Everyone remembers the famous (infamous?) shot of President Bush on the aircraft carrier with the mission accomplished banner waving, in my head I substitute in Obama and pretend the war was against the economy. Instead of acknowledging that their stimulus has clearly NOT worked (unemployment heading over 10%) they're simply claiming victory.

On Friday (as reported in the Huffington Post), Jared Bernstein, white house economic advisor, declared that Obama’s stimulus package has “saved or created about 650,000 jobs”. The problem is, that statistic, according to Harvard Economist Greg Mankiw, is an “immeasurable metric” (i.e. complete fiction). We cannot possibly calculate jobs saved and the evidence seems to point to gross overstatement of jobs created. There is simply no way to find out. In the phrase ‘jobs saved or created’ the spin gurus have worked a masterpiece. They found a ‘macroeconomic estimation’ of the impact spending could have on employment and they’ve ran with it.

If there is any silver lining here, the inverse statistic is easily measured: jobs NOT saved. Since Obama’s stimulus passed in February the American economy lost nearly 3.7 million jobs, not even counting October. So if Obama’s plan saved/created 650,000 jobs (dubious), but we still lost 3.7 million, by their best guess the plan was not even 15% effective at stemming the tide of job losses. It seems they pushed a plan to spend 787 billion dollars of tax payer money on a stimulus that hasn’t actually stimulated anything... definitely a 'mission accomplished'.