HOUSE Republican Leader John Boehner

Obama Treasury Secretary Grilled About Bogus Job Creation Claims

In an interview on NBC’s Meet the Press, Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner repeated the Obama Administrations’ debunked claim that the “stimulus” has “saved or created 640,000 jobs” - despite the fact that unemployment is nearing 10 percent, and “underemployment” is already at 17 percent.

Meet the Press moderator David Gregory challenged Secretary Geithner’s assertion that the “stimulus” is working, citing a memo from Dr. Alan Meltzer to House Republican Leader John Boehner (R-OH), who wrote that “[t]here is no greater recognition of the failure of the stimulus program to create jobs than the efforts to mislead the public into believing the program had saved thousands, or millions, of jobs.”

The transcript follows:

GREGORY: Let’s talk about claims of success about jobs.  The White House says 640,000 jobs have been created or saved by the $800 billion stimulus.  There are Republicans who say the number is bogus, that it’s just P.R.

John Boehner, Leader of the Republicans in the House, as you well know, circulated a quote from an economist at Carnegie Mellon University, and I’ll put it up on the screen and you can look at it. “One can search economic textbooks forever without finding a concept called `jobs saved.’ It doesn’t exist for good reason: how can anyone know that his or her job has been saved?”

You’ve got a lot of experience in the economy.  Is this P.R. or fact?

GEITHNER: This is fact.

Millions of Americans would beg to differ.  The Washington Examiner noted in an editorial today:

Even if we take at face value the White House claim that it created or saved all these jobs with approximately $150 billion of the economic stimulus money, a little simple math shows the taxpayers aren’t getting any bargains here: $150 billion divided by 650,000 jobs equals $230,000 per job saved or created.

Moreover, the Democrats’ $1 trillion “stimulus”  was doomed from the start because it was based on the flawed assumption that one can grow the economy by government borrowing, new taxes, and outlandish spending.  As Caroline Baum noted in Bloomberg News last week: “[t]he government has no money of its own to spend; only what it borrows or confiscates from us via taxation…That’s why ‘jobs created or saved’ is such pure fiction.  It ignores what’s unseen, as our old friend Frederic Bastiat explained so eloquently 160 years ago in an essay.”

The “stimulus” hasn’t created the jobs the President promised because it relies on big-government spending instead of helping small businesses, which are the foundation of job creation in America.  House Republicans offered a plan to let small businesses and families keep more of what they earn, but Democrats ignored it, took a go-it-alone approach, and passed their trillion-dollar big government plan anyway.   And it’s the American middle class that is paying the price.

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This entry was posted on Monday, November 2nd, 2009 at 2:11 pm and is filed under Stimulus. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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