One More Time, All Together: The "Stimulus" Worked!

Wednesday, August 25, 2010 3:53 PM

...or so you might believe, after a cursory glance at the Congressional Budget Office's most recent "stimulus" report, which they are required, by mandate in the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, to release every so often as a reminder that the government is, indeed, still wasting taxpayer money.

The problem, to borrow from the great Yogi Berra, is that this is just "deja vu all over again." Every few months the CBO essentially releases the same report they've been circling for the past 18 months, just with a few new numbers punched in. Even CBO's director, Doug Elmendorf, has been explicit regarding the fallacy of the CBO report, admitting that the legally-required exercise is one that is designed as a self-fulfilling prophesy to report the success of the "stimulus."

This is because the numbers in the CBO reports are achieved by using models based on the same fuzzy math that got us the political talking point of jobs "saved or created" to begin with. Every few months CBO tells us that the "stimulus" created jobs because it is using calculations that were designed to show that the "stimulus" would create jobs. Elmendorf has admitted that this metric would not be able to demonstrate that the "stimulus" failed its objectives, because it was simply not designed to encapsulate such an occurance. Unsurprinsgly, this recycled rhetoric has done nothing to change the dismal economy.

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