More Stimulus Nonsense

The President is slated to visit Charlotte today to tour a facility that manufactures “green” battery parts and defend his wealth-destroying “stimulus” bill.

Regarding the stimulus,

Liz Oxhorn, a White House spokeswoman, defended the jobs tally.

“Experts ranging from private forecaster Moody’s Economy.com to the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office agree it’s already responsible for about 2 million jobs nationwide,” she said. “These independent experts use widely accepted methods to measure job progress that were in use long before the Recovery Act, and the Congressional Budget Office is often regarded as the gold standard for evaluating government programs by members of Congress on both sides of the aisle.”

The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office said in a February report that up to 2.1 million jobs had been created. But in the same report, it cautioned that the data is “not as helpful in determining [the stimulus bill’s] economic effects as might be supposed, because isolating those effects would require knowing what path the economy would have taken in the absence” of the stimulus bill.

Translation: the CBO’s estimates are completely meaningless.

Indeed, the CBO’s methodology assumes that stimulus spending creates jobs, so their estimates are not to determine if the stimulus worked, but is merely an exercise to produce some number showing how much it worked.

The CBO’s conclusion that the stimulus created jobs is based on an economic model that began with the premise that all stimulus bills create jobs. In other words, the conclusion is already assumed as a premise. Logicians call this the fallacy of begging the question. Mathematicians call it assuming what you are trying to prove.

 The CBO’s assumptions are guided by blind faith in vulgar Keynsian dogma – a dogma that is “widely accepted” by politicians because it tells them what they want to hear: that government should control, restrict, distort and otherwise micromanage the economic decisions of millions of Americans.

Back to the article, George Mason University economist Russ Roberts noted that much of the stimulus money “went to Ph.D.s when the hungry people are the construction workers.”