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Sunday, October 16, 2011

Obama's Jobs Bill, Minus The Jobs: Insane

By Susan Duclos

Broswing the Internet I came across a piece over at Bloomberg, by Caroline Baum, which asks "What do you call a jobs bill that professes to create jobs when in fact it wouldn’t have much of a real-world effect?"

She goes on to describe Obama's so-called jobs bill which is really a tax increase bill "Naive, misinformed, short-sighted, targeted and insane."

5. Insane

Obama has vowed to forge ahead with his jobs plan, fulfilling that well-known definition of insanity: doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result. In February 2009, Congress enacted the $825 billion American Reinvestment and Recovery Act. Since then, the U.S. economy has lost an additional 1.5 million workers.

The Obama administration can argue that the stimulus “created or saved” 3.5 million jobs, and that the economy would have been in worse shape without it, but those assertions can’t be tested or proved. Only in model-land can econometricians pinpoint outcomes to the nearest 10th of a percentage point.

If the stimulus had been successful, Obama wouldn’t be hawking version 2.0, with many of the same short-term incentives that didn’t fool those it was designed to help.

Read the entire thing over at Bloomberg.

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