Stimulus Spending's Statistical Shenanigans
Brad Harrington
By Bradley Harrington
"There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies,
and statistics." --Mark Twain, "Chapters From My
Autobiography," 1907--
Remember, back in February, when Congress and President
Obama decided to blow $787 billion taxpayer dollars on
"recovery" and economic "stimulation"? Ever wonder just
what, exactly, happened to all of that money?
Well, $18 million of it went to the creation of a
website, www.recovery.gov, where all of that information
has now been sifted, sorted, analyzed, compiled, massaged
and arranged in pretty little rows just for your perusal. Have
no fears, comrades, for spending transparency has arrived
at last.
Under the "State/Territory Summaries" selection, for
example, you can select a given state, then choose the
option to "View all congressional districts" for a
breakdown of the number of jobs created in any given
district. If you select Arizona, for instance, you can see
that there were 30 jobs created in that state's 15th
congressional district. There's only one problem:
Arizona, being limited to 8 congressional districts,
DOESN'T HAVE a 15th district.
And if you select California, you will discover that
there were 4 jobs created in the 57th district, 4.6 jobs
in the 64th and 1 job in the 99th. There's only three
problems: California, being limited to 53 congressional
districts, DOESN'T HAVE a 57th, 64th or 99th district.
So, where do these dreamed-up districts come from? Your
guess is as good as mine--but it's probably going to be
a better guess, I would reckon, than that of this website's
$18 million webmaster. At least if you live in Arizona or
California.
And if you think those are isolated examples, you've got
another think coming: As reported by ABC, there's been
a total of $6.4 billion spent to create over 30,000 jobs in
440 congressional districts that are so "transparent" they
don't exist.
And how, you might wonder, does the White House refer
to these statistical shenanigans? Edward DeSeve, Special
Advisor to the President, on the www.whitehouse.gov
website, calls it a "huge success," and goes on to state
that the mistakes, while possibly adding up to "5-10
percent of the total," don't really "undermine information
at the heart of the data" because most of them are the
result of "typos and coding errors."
Is this guy for real? Try telling your bank that you bounced
all your checks because your arithmetic was "5-10
percent" off due to "coding errors" and see if they'll cover
them for you. Now THAT would be a "huge success."
And isn't it funny that there are no reports of DEFLATED
data, only INFLATED data? One would expect, after all,
in the normally muddled and incompetent scheme of things,
just as many bogus minus signs as bogus plus signs--but
that doesn't appear to be the case. So much for "typos and
coding errors."
The fact of the matter is that the "stimulus" package, the
alleged goal of which was to create millions of jobs, has
been an utter failure, and the Obama administration is
clutching at every possible straw--including phony cook-
the-data straws--to try and hide that fact.
That such is the case is obvious to anyone at even a
cursory glance: for dollars that have been looted from
the taxpaying population, and then disbursed according to
the dictates of pork-barrel politics, will never generate
the kind of return they would have achieved if left free
to flow as they would have in the absence of the theft.
Sure, you can "create" a job by spending plundered loot:
but what about the job that was lost, which nobody ever
sees, because its creation was never funded by taxpayers
spending or saving their money as they choose in the first
place? Well, we just won't mention that, will we? Like the
shyster poker hustler who attracts the attention of his
pushover patsies with an engaging smile as he deals the
stack from the bottom of the deck, this administration is
pointing to the limited examples of "stimulus" jobs here
and there while ignoring and evading the reality of the
(ever-increasing) areas of jobless wastelands in between.
And that, exactly, is the real tragedy here: not that we
have been duped by an $18 million boondoggle in regard
to a nearly $1 trillion spending spree, but that we have
been made to swallow the myth that government
manipulation of our money can ever create anything
besides a constantly-widening spread of economic
dislocation and disaster.
--
Bradley Harrington is a former United States Marine
and a free-lance writer who lives in Cheyenne, Wyoming.
Arnold Broese
news:he0q9t$jb6$1...@vulture.killfile.org...
> STIMULUS SPENDING'S STATISTICAL SHENANIGANS
Good that someone is riding shotgun. Make them keep their heads down. :-)
--
Arnold
1Z
wrote:
> STIMULUS SPENDING'S STATISTICAL SHENANIGANS
> And if you think those are isolated examples, you've got
> another think coming: As reported by ABC, there's been
> a total of $6.4 billion spent to create over 30,000 jobs in
> 440 congressional districts that are so "transparent" they
> don't exist.
cock-up, not conspiracy
WASHINGTON -- When Barbara Harrison, director of the housing authority
in Burkburnett, Texas, recently filled out a form to report a $99,664
federal stimulus award, she didn't know the number for her local
congressional district. She doesn't remember what she listed, and now,
the grant shows up on a federal Web site as District 00 -- which
doesn't exist.
Jim Klein
wrote:
> The fact of the matter is that the "stimulus" package, the
> alleged goal of which was to create millions of jobs, has
> been an utter failure,
Finally...you get SOMETHING wrong!
Goal sought, goal achieved. It's been a
complete success, for the most part.
You're looking at your standards of success,
not theirs, I think.
The fact that the other 295 million of us don't
really care how well our roads are striped, is
irrelevant to this particular point. I'm confident
the goal-seekers are not going hungry at all,
even as some of the appendaged parasites
are starting to shake out of their sleep.
> and the Obama administration is
> clutching at every possible straw--including phony cook-
> the-data straws--to try and hide that fact.
What's far more worrisome to me, is that they
don't really try too hard to hide the facts.
Ominous or onerous, it's trouble.
jk
RichD
> Remember, back in February, when Congress and President
> Obama decided to blow $787 billion taxpayer dollars on
> "recovery" and economic "stimulation"? Ever wonder just
> what, exactly, happened to all of that money?
>
> Well, $18 million of it went to the creation of a
> website,www.recovery.gov,
Source?
--
Rich
Brad Harrington
>> STIMULUS SPENDING'S STATISTICAL SHENANIGANS
> Arnold Broese wrote:
> Good that someone is riding shotgun. Make them keep their heads down. :-)
Heh heh heh!! I'm armed with more than bogus statistics, that's for sure.
Brad Harrington
Brad Harrington
>> The fact of the matter is that the "stimulus" package, the
>> alleged goal of which was to create millions of jobs, has
>> been an utter failure,
> Jim Klein wrote:
> Finally...you get SOMETHING wrong!
What!? I get stuff wrong all the time...just ask my wife
and kids...
> Goal sought, goal achieved. It's been a
> complete success, for the most part.
And your criteria for that judgment would be...??
> You're looking at your standards of success,
> not theirs, I think.
My criteria, my "standard of success" if you will,
would be that more jobs were created than were
destroyed.
NOT, take note, the number of jobs created. The
number of jobs created as compared to the number
of jobs DESTROYED.
The rest of my piece makes it pretty clear why the
second has to be greater than the first, but I'll make
the point again:
The created jobs come from taxpayer funds, which
means: taxpayers have that much less to spend or
save, which means: all the sectors of the economy
that would have been patronized by those taxpayer
dollars were never funded, which means: job losses
in those sectors to balance the job "gains" in the
sectors that have been spoon-fed the plundered
dollars.
And more: a net LOSS, not merely a balance,
because dollars left free to flow where they will, will
ALWAYS generate more productivity than dollars
that have been forcibly relocated to fund pork-barrel
nonsense.
If you disagree with any of this, I'd be curious as to
why, as I am always open to an explanation of my
errors.
Brad Harrington
Brad Harrington
>> Well, $18 million of it went to the creation of a
>RichD wrote:
> Source?
Lots. Here's one:
Brad Harrington
Jim Klein
wrote:
> > You're looking at your standards of success,
> > not theirs, I think.
>
> My criteria, my "standard of success" if you will,
> would be that more jobs were created than were
> destroyed.
>
> NOT, take note, the number of jobs created. The
> number of jobs created as compared to the number
> of jobs DESTROYED.
Sorry; maybe I was too cryptic again. Your standards
are eminently reasonable, and are the measure against
which any so-called "objective success" would be
judged.
I was making the trivial point that by THEIR standards,
meaning those who are engaging the action, everything
is going just fine and each day's "success" manages to
top yesterday's. No, it is not a reasonable standard and
yes, it leads to human death rather than human life.
But still, it's their standard and they're doing a bang-up
job of succeeding at their death-inducing goals. That's all.
jk
vonvegas
"If you disagree with any of this, I'd be curious as to
why, as I am always open to an explanation of my
errors."
Brad, you do make one error which I suspect the looney left
will seize upon. The error occurs when you say:
"The created jobs come from taxpayer funds..." which is untrue
because there is no present taxpayer fund, rather those jobs
are funded with *borrowed* money instead.
FWIW, and it may not be worth much because I'm no economist,
the Keynesian idea here is that to mitigate the pain of a
severe economic downturn, it is better to have the
government "create" jobs by spending borrowed money which it
is true will have to *eventually* be repaid. But presumably
that repayment, so the theory goes, will take place over
time and in better circumstances when the economy can more
easily tolerate the loss of jobs due to that repayment.
So on net, the question becomes whether or not the
additional cost of interest on that borrowed money is
ultimately offset by the benefit of smoothing out the
boom/bust curve. That is not an easy question and I'd be
very interested to hear other's informed opinions. In
particular, perhaps you could query David Friedman on this
topic.
IMO, for this Keynesian idea to work at all, those jobs must
be very carefully targeted to genuine areas of investment
with a future payoff. But predictably, the Demorats seem to
have done the usual and passed out the money primarily to
their political pals, which infuriates the Republicans
because they've thereby been denied the opportunity to
reward their political allies instead. Well, I'll get off
my soap box now and look forward to any comments you or
others care to make.
Vonvegas
Brad Harrington
> "If you disagree with any of this, I'd be curious as to
> why, as I am always open to an explanation of my
> errors."
> Vonvegas wrote:
> Brad, you do make one error which I suspect the looney left will seize
> upon. The error occurs when you say:
> "The created jobs come from taxpayer funds..." which is untrue because
> there is no present taxpayer fund, rather those jobs are funded with
> *borrowed* money instead.
That is true enough. Although, I would maintain, somebody's
gotta pay for that "borrowed" money sometime...in which case,
we are back to my original point.
However, Vonvegas, I think your assessment of the
intellectual caliber of the Left is far more generous than it needs
to be, as none of the critiques of that piece made that point--
they just called me names and left it at that. <hoot> Heh heh
heh!!
Brad Harrington