When you are President Obama and your Osama kill “bounce” has evaporated into thin air, you look just about anywhere for good uplifting news.
Or to be more precise, less awful!
That is apparently what has happened with the news that the trillion-dollar “stimulus” pushed by Obama not only failed to add jobs but, in fact, forced nearly 600,000 jobs into obscurity.
As reported, in part, at the reference:
New economics research suggests that President Obama's stimulus plan may have destroyed or forestalled employment, including more than 1 million private-sector jobs.
Economists Timothy Conley, University of Western Ontario, and Bill Dupor of Ohio State University found that the stimulus resulted in a net loss of 595,000 jobs from April 2009 to September 2010.
That counters research by the Congressional Budget Office, the Council of Economic Advisors, and many other economists. But Conley and Dupor's research differs in that instead of looking at the stimulus' effects on total employment, it breaks jobs into four different sectors:
Goods-producing industries, including manufacturing.
Health and education, leisure, and business and professional (HELP) services.
Other service industries.
State and local government.
The authors divided employment this way "because of the large differences in trends across the sectors over the past decade."
Their paper shows the stimulus created or saved 443,000 government jobs and 92,000 non-HELP service jobs. But it destroyed or forestalled 772,000 HELP jobs and 362,000 goods-producing positions. That's a net loss of 1.042 million private jobs.
"I don't find that very compelling," said Dean Baker, co-director of the liberal Center for Economic and Policy Research. "Since 2008 the economy went through a wringer and trends in these sectors were broken ... furthermore, their results were only marginally significant."
While acknowledging that Conley and Dupor's result were not very statistically robust, James Sherk argues that the lack of job growth is a significant finding.
"If the other studies which are programmed to show that the stimulus has a positive effect on jobs were right, then you'd expect Conley-Dupor to show 2 to 3 million jobs created," said Sherk, senior policy analyst at the conservative Heritage Foundation. "That it was a negative figure ... tells you at best the stimulus was a wash."
A wash? For a trillion dollars, America deserves much more than a wash!
Still, as Nancy Pelosi would say, “This could have been a lot worse. Only due to the president’s determination and intelligence have the losses been minimized. Americans should be celebrating the president’s victory!”
And so it is in the once great nation of America!
Ref: http://www.investors.com/NewsAndAnalysis/Article/572443/201105171800/Stimulus-Cost-1-Mil-Private-Jobs-.htm
