So anxious was Madam House Speaker to sell the “stimulus” boondoggle bill, she flubbed the numbers. “Five hundred million people will lose their jobs each month until we have an economic package,” she warned. Chris Wallace of Fox News corrected her.
WALLACE: No, 500,000.
PELOSI: What did I say, million?
WALLACE: Yes, 500 million. That would really be a recession.
PELOSI: Oh, no. Excuse me. Thank you for correcting me.
WALLACE: Yes.
PELOSI: It feels like 500 million. Five hundred thousand Americans will lose their jobs each month until we have a recovery package.
Obama’s folks claim the stimulus bill will create jobs, not save 500,000 jobs per month. “Christina Romer and Jared Bernstein, now top White House economic advisers, said a plan roughly similar to the House-passed version would yield 3.3 million to 4.1 million jobs by late 2010 that wouldn’t otherwise exist — but added a catch,” reports the Associated Press.
So, what’s the catch? They made up the “rule of thumb” figures.
“There is considerable uncertainty in our estimates,” Romer and Bernstein admitted. Job creation figures “are hard to estimate precisely.”
The projections are “delicate,” that is to say easily contested. On January 21, economist Mark Zandi predicted the House bill would create 4 million jobs, based on assumptions that all its money would be spent by the end of 2010. Soon thereafter, the Congressional Budget Office projected that more than one-third of the bill’s spending and tax cuts would not occur until after 2010, so Mr. Zandi revised his “rule of thumb” job creation estimate to 3 million. If challenged again, will Zandi drop his estimate to 2 million?
According to Joel Prakken, chairman of Macroeconomic Advisers, the so-called economic stimulus package will do nothing to prevent unemployment. Prakken said he expected Friday’s comprehensive payrolls report issued by the government to show a drop of about 500,000 jobs for the month of January. It is too late to prevent another significant rise in the U.S. unemployment rate, he said. He added that he expected about 3 million job losses over the next 12 months.
Romer, Bernstein, and Zandi are side-stepping the real issue — unemployment will continue until the credit machine begins working again and the mortgage default and foreclosure problems are adequately addressed.
Not that they will be. Because the “liquidity crisis” was manufactured by the bankers.
“I suspect that part of what we’re seeing in the freezing up of lending markets is strategic behavior on the part of big financial players who stand to benefit from the bailout,” David K. Levine, a liquidity constraints and game theory economist at Washington University in St. Louis, told Bloomberg last September. In other words, the bankers created the crisis in order to fleece clueless taxpayers.
In addition to fleecing the taxpayers under false pretense, the manufactured economic crisis is a great way to push for world government, something long dominating the wish list of the bankers and their functionaries like Gordon Brown, Dominique Strauss-Kahn, Nicolas Sarkozy, Tony Blair, Angela Merkel, and others.
Finally, even Obama admits the current stimulus scheme will not fix the economy. He admitted as much on January 31 during his weekly radio address. “No one bill, no matter how comprehensive, can cure what ails our economy.”
That’s because what “ails our economy” was manufactured.
If 5 million or 500,000 people lose their jobs each month, you can bet it was planned that way.
Poster Comment:
Wallace did correct her and she said she meant 500,000 a month.