No way at all to reliably measure “jobs saved,” and claiming that any post hoc increase in employment is due to policies and spending is still not honest, as reliably tracing the origins of incremental employment to specific policies is simply not feasible. It also requires ignoring the flip side of jobs not created in the first place by policies and resultant taxation.

Example: If there is an increase in 500K jobs over 12 months, the admin will claim credit–but it’s entirely possible the increase would have been twice as large without the policies/spending, so the true economic result of the policies/spending would be a 500K loss. More likely is continued erosion of employement extending several months past the “bottom” of the recession–and then the admin will claim they prevented it from being even worse and thus “saved” XXX jobs, likewise an economically unsupportable and econometrically unverifiable claim.

Of course, it’s not as if every other admin hasn’t made similar claims. The silly thing is that people believe them.

Depending on the moment, George Bush claimed he created 2.4 million, 4.8 million or I don’t even remember his other claims. And with some deft mathmatics he could justify his numbers but no one could ever figure out where those jobs were.

Same with Obama..the guy in the White House gets to TRY and shape the reality, but until we actually start seeing dropping unemployment and underemployment, it’s just words.

Call me skeptical….I’m am hopeful, but so far his recovery bill is anemic, his bank bill a joke, and his decision to follow W. on more than a few War on Terror issues has me greviously concerned.

What? You’ve never heard of Psychohistory? Seriously though, it’s a good idea that implies transparency.

And if you believe those figures, or even that it’s possible to make such a prediction within an entire order of magnitude, I have a watch to sell you. Also a bridge, and some lovely water-front property in Florida.

Seriously, it’s simply blue-sky BS. But it is nice to have the linkage to all 1,000-plus pages of the bill so we can red it, since Congress didn’t do so before passing it.