Suppose the president of a company told you his business earned somewhere between $1.2 million and $2.8 million last year. You might be skeptical, because there is a huge gap between $1.2 million and $2.8 million. You might even wonder whether the executive really knew how much money his company made.
But the federal government is offering even fishier estimates on the number of jobs supposedly “created or saved” under the $862 billion “stimulus” that Democrats passed last year. The money was supposed to jump-start the economy and keep unemployment under 8 percent. Joblessness is now nearly 10 percent, and there is serious concern about a possible “double-dip” recession.
Yet the Congressional Budget Office has put out an estimate of jobs supposedly linked to the stimulus. It says 1.2 million to 2.8 million jobs were “created or retained” by the law.
Do you have any confidence in those figures? After all, that is a big, 1.6 million-job gap between the low and the high estimate. Doesn’t that seem more like guesswork than an indication that the “stimulus” is working — especially when you consider that unemployment has stuck stubbornly around 10 percent and may get worse?
Well, consider the Congressional Budget Office’s own words of caution about the jobs estimate.