Those 600,000 jobs “saved or created”

You probably watched the media swallow hook line and sinker that idiot line from the President yesterday about the 600,000 jobs he was going to “save or create”. And the 150,000 jobs he’s already “saved”. The Wall Street Journal weighs in today;

[Bush Administration staffer, Tony] Fratto sees a double standard at play. “We would never have used a formula like ‘save or create,'” he tells me. “To begin with, the number is pure fiction — the administration has no way to measure how many jobs are actually being ‘saved.’ And if we had tried to use something this flimsy, the press would never have let us get away with it.”

Of course, the inability to measure Mr. Obama’s jobs formula is part of its attraction. Never mind that no one — not the Labor Department, not the Treasury, not the Bureau of Labor Statistics — actually measures “jobs saved.” As the New York Times delicately reports, Mr. Obama’s jobs claims are “based on macroeconomic estimates, not an actual counting of jobs.” Nice work if you can get away with it.

Yeah, I remember the Left complaining that the only jobs the Bush Administration was creating was at McDonald’s for eight years, but they’re perfectly content to hear ambiguous and imprecise language from their guy.

“The expression ‘create or save,’ which has been used regularly by the President and his economic team, is an act of political genius,” writes [Harvard economist and former Bush economic adviser Greg] Mankiw. “You can measure how many jobs are created between two points in time. But there is no way to measure how many jobs are saved. Even if things get much, much worse, the President can say that there would have been 4 million fewer jobs without the stimulus.”

Mr. Obama’s comments yesterday are a perfect illustration of just such a claim. In the months since Congress approved the stimulus, our economy has lost nearly 1.6 million jobs and unemployment has hit 9.4%. Invoke the magic words, however, and — presto! — you have the president claiming he has “saved or created” 150,000 jobs.

But MSNBC is ready to drink the Koolaid;

Just how much of an impact Obama’s recovery program had on the pace of job losses is up for debate.

Obama has claimed as many as 150,000 jobs saved or created by his stimulus plan so far, even as government reports have shown the economy has lost more than 1.6 million jobs since Congress approved funding for the program in February.

Republicans remain critical of the stimulus spending, slamming it as a big government program that ultimately will do little for recovery.

With only a fraction of the federal money actually spent thus far, it’s premature to give the stimulus plan credit for economic trends, congressional Republicans said last week.

Of course, if the media is just going to take everything that Obama says at face value, why do we have a media? Just turn over MSNBC to the White House.

ADDED: The folks at Newsy read my post and sent this video to accompany it;

Category: Barack Obama/Joe Biden, Economy, Liberals suck, Media