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November 25, 2011
Too Confusing For Liberals
Topics: Political News and commentariesIf your computer model assumes that the stimulus created jobs, it's a sure bet that it will discover that the stimulus ... you guessed it - 'created' jobs:
.... according to the CBO's top official, the figures in this report and previous mandatory stimulus don't actually tell us whether or not the stimulus created jobs. That's because, as I've noted so many times before, the reports rerun slightly updated versions of the same models of that were used to estimate that the stimulus would create jobs prior to the law's passage. And lo and behold, if you create a model that predicts the law will create jobs, and then you rerun a mild variation of that model a few years later using updated figures about what money was actually spent, it still reports that the stimulus created jobs. But there's no counting here, no real-world attempt to assess the reality of the stimulus -- just a model that assumes that stimulus spending will create jobs and therefore reports that stimulus spending has in fact created jobs. As CBO director Douglas Elmendorf confirmed on the record last year in response to a question, "if the stimulus bill did not do what it was originally forecast to do, then that would not have been detected by the subsequent analysis."
Posted by Hyscience at November 25, 2011 11:12 AM
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