Wednesday, September 14, 2011

The Sister Bertrille Effect

In Best of the Web today, James Taranto notes the cartoonish silliness of the latest (third? fourth?) incarnation of "anti-anti-Obama vigilance" on the Web, AttackWatch.com:
"Rick Perry's massive jobs lie." Here the source is PolitiFact.com, which said "pants on fire" to the Texas governor for the following statement: "[Obama] had $800 billion worth of stimulus in the first round of stimulus. It created zero jobs."

AttackWatch.com counters that PolitiFact "refers to four independent analyses by the Congressional Budget Office and three private assessments of the American Reinvestment and Recovery Act to determine that anywhere between 1.3 million and 3.6 million jobs were created or saved by the stimulus—'but certainly more than zero.' "

Let's take the Obama Administration and PolitiFact and AttackWatch.com and OFA, et al, at their word and assume that ARRA indeed saved or created 3.6 million jobs. In fact, let's take that as axiomatic.

Given that the US economy lost 0.8 million additional jobs in the wake of ARRA, the inescapable conclusion is that ARRA concurrently lost or destroyed 4.4 million jobs, causing the net loss of 0.8 million jobs. If all of the changes in US employment in one direction were due to ARRA, then all of the changes in the other direction were also due to ARRA.

In the 1960s TV show "The Flying Nun," Sister Bertrille finds out that the reason the Puerto Rican breezes loft her into the air by her exotically styled, overstarched wimple can be expressed in the formula "Lift + Thrust > Load + Drag." Obamanomics recalls this aerodynamics formula, because the Obama Administration and its Democrat allies in Congress thought that ARRA would provide lift and thrust to economic activity, but instead constructed it in such a way - and accompanied it with so much other regulation - that they added massive load and drag to the economy, sending it into further decline.

The corollary formula for Obama's employment policies is: "Saved + Created < Lost + Destroyed."