The Failure of the Stimulus Plan *
By fenderpooh

Remember that near trillion-dollar spending bill that Congress absolutely had to pass, without even taking the time to read it, because if they didn’t we were on the verge of total economic meltdown (so we were told by the White House)? How are things shaping up now that that bill has been in the works for several months?

Rick Klein of ABC News reports that the President’s goals for this bill keep shifting as it becomes evident that his original prognostications about its effectiveness were completely wrong. With no hard numbers to prove the success of this bill, the President keeps talking about the number of jobs that have been “s...

The Failure of the Stimulus Plan *
By fenderpooh

Remember that near trillion-dollar spending bill that Congress absolutely had to pass, without even taking the time to read it, because if they didn’t we were on the verge of total economic meltdown (so we were told by the White House)? How are things shaping up now that that bill has been in the works for several months?

Rick Klein of ABC News reports that the President’s goals for this bill keep shifting as it becomes evident that his original prognostications about its effectiveness were completely wrong. With no hard numbers to prove the success of this bill, the President keeps talking about the number of jobs that have been “saved” because he and Congress acted when they did. The problem with this argument is that there is no scientific way to determine how many jobs have been “saved.” It’s a false statistic.

The White House talking points on this have already begun a shift into this kind of claim:

“The economy is still bad, but it would have been a whole lot worse if we hadn’t passed the stimulus bill.”

There is no way to verify or falsify this claim. And that’s why it will probably work so well for the White House: it doesn’t really deal with reality, just like the stimulus bill itself.

* Moving the Stimulus Goalposts June 29, 2009