Politics

The President’s Unassailable Logic

Greg Mankiw, a professor of economics at Harvard University, has a blog post about how President Obama will measure the success of his stimulus plan. The President says that the ?bottom-line, number one? measure of success is ?creating or saving 4 million jobs.?

Mr. Mankiw argues that if we use the President?s metric, his plan will never fail because he can always argue that as bad as things have become, there are 4 million jobs somewhere in America that his stimulus saved. The President has stumbled upon a politically useful statistic: one that is impossible to measure.

By counting jobs that were saved, the President has chosen to recognize jobs that were not lost as a victory for his stimulus bill. It cannot be argued against because there is no way of calculating if those jobs would have been lost absent his $1.1 trillion stimulus plan. In the end, the President can set is goal wherever he likes and claim victory. His logic may be irrefutable, but that does not make it meaningful.

Full post as published by Mike Conaway's Blog on February 25, 2009 (boomark / email).