Team Obama pushes 'create-and-save' meme too far

That bucket was full of holes the first time he used it. But now, cue the laughtrack. This lame meme has been repeated a few times beyond the limit. Some links below on Team Obama's fraudulent economic "measurements" and reporting:

Andy McCarthy (from Sunday): Obamanomics: How Stupid Do They Think We Are?

Weekly Standard (yesterday): What Happened While Barack Was 'Saving and Creating' and By Obama's Own Standards, Stimulus A Failure

Herein even the AP notices the emperor's malfunctioning wardrobe:

The White House is defending the overly optimistic economic models it used to justify the historic stimulus plan. Four months after the stimulus was passed, unemployment is far higher than expected and continuing to rise. It is even higher than the White House predicted it would have been without the stimulus.

But read on for more brazen spin from the administration on the economy and the stimulus via Jake Tapper. I love Obama's reversion to purely subjective (and absolutely non-scientific) measurements here:

“The only measure of progress, is whether or not the American people are seeing some progress in their own lives. And so although we've seen some stabilizing in the financial markets and credit spreads have gone down, we're seeing a reduction in the fear that gripped the market just a few months ago, stock market is up a little bit -- all that stuff is not our ultimate goal.”

What does he think actual measurements are for, except to quantify real progress, as opposed to going by feel? Honestly.

Allahpundit is trying to squelch his giddiness on this:

Voters now trust Republicans more than Democrats on six out of 10 key issues, including the top issue of the economy.

The latest Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey finds that 45% now trust the GOP more to handle economic issues, while 39% trust Democrats more.

Today, WSJ Online has this headline: The Media Fall for Phony 'Jobs' Claims

Excerpts:

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.

And get away with it he has. However dubious it may be as an economic measure, as a political formula "save or create" allows the president to invoke numbers that convey an illusion of precision. Harvard economist and former Bush economic adviser Greg Mankiw calls it a "non-measurable metric." And on his blog, he acknowledges the political attraction.

"The expression 'create or save,' which has been used regularly by the President and his economic team, is an act of political genius," writes Mr. 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."

Read the rest.

Even the Washington Post has to acknowledge some hard facts:

Obama's continued promotion of the stimulus measure carries with it risk, as yesterday's events provided another opportunity for the media to cast a skeptical eye on the administration's claims. The Los Angeles Times writes that "so far the promised federal money has been slow in coming" and that the job creation numbers cited by the White House "appear to be elastic." More bluntly, some critics are calling the statistics "pure fiction." And others are pointing out that Obama seems to be recycling his material: Yesterday's Associated Press dispatch called the president's latest spending promises "summer reruns."

Amid all the bickering over statistics, here are two numbers that are not in dispute -- 9.4 and 42. The first is the unemployment rate as of May, which prompted Obama to say yesterday he was "not satisfied" with the pace of recovery so far, and forced the White House to defend "the overly optimistic economic models it used to justify the historic stimulus plan." The second is the percentage of respondents in the latest Gallup poll who disapprove of Obama's handling of the economy, up 12 points since February. Now, "Obama is under political pressure to show more immediate results," the Wall Street Journal writes, but a faster economic turnaround probably isn't within his power to create.

Linked by Michelle Malkin (buzzworthy)

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