Unmeasurable Job Growth

I've just visited Gregory Mankiw's blog again (If you don't, you should. It's one of the top 100 blogs listed by Technorati.com), and I'm very happy to see that in his post “Create or Save” he has clearly explained how politicized and convoluted the language surrounding the stimulus program has become. What he touches on is something I noticed just after Barack Obama was elected. He started using slightly different language when describing what his “stimulus” package would do.

(Incidentally, Mankiw is also using quotes to describe the “stimulus” program. For anyone not paying attention, I need to point out, this is a very telling sign of how this typically objective economist feels about the program.)

Obama began using the words “save jobs.” My observation was “how will we know?” How, exactly, do you measure “jobs saved”? Well, you can't. And people like Greg Mankiw most of all know how important that little piece of word smithing could become. He calls the language “an act of political genius.”

But I've always considered intelligence overrated. It's given us communism, fascism, Nazism, eugenics, political correctness, closed scientific and medical minds, centralized banking and a number of other serious social, intellectual and financial problems. A recent one was called Enron. AKA “the smartest people in the room.” More recently, though, it's produced artificially created billionaire Bernie Madoff. So much for intelligence. If honesty and open mindedness are to be considered the hallmarks of more average intelligence, I'll take average over the more insidious genius, or “political genius,” anytime.

Alright, digression over. I'm just pleased to see that someone else is impressed with how politically “savvy” Obama and his advisors are – already – and that someone else knows there is no proper metric that will give us anything close to measurable when deciding how many jobs have been “saved” - and wants to direct some attention toward it.

He also has a quick post called “Talking Down The Economy” that points out how Obama has been “fear mongering” regarding the economy.

And another post talks about “The End Of Welfare Reform As We Know It.” This is a strange thing for the democrats to focus on, especially since it was such a successful reform program for their democratic predecessor, Bill Clinton. What's most interesting, is that this “End” is hidden, in of all things, the “stimulus” bill.