The real travesty here isn’t that President Obama claimed, without any solid evidence, to have saved American jobs through his policies. You expect that from an admitted partisan. No, the disappointment is how the media simply reported the claim as if he had cracked out charts and had proven in detail that the jobs were saved. But what else do we expect?

Anyway, FactCheck.org was interested in finding out if the White House could actually back up the president’s claim, especially since 1.3 million Americans have lost their jobs since he’s taken office. In fact, the Department of Labor announced 631,000 new unemployment claims on the day of the press conference. So, where did the White House get the 150k number?

We asked the White House for substantiation of Obama’s claim, and a spokesman responded that the figure comes from a recent estimate by the Council of Economic Advisers. “Because the baseline for employment is obviously still strongly downward,” the spokesman told us, “the estimate does not mean that employment has risen by 150,000. Rather, it means that employment is 150,000 higher than it otherwise would have been.” He said the figure is an estimate of people hired to work directly on ARRA-funded projects, plus “jobs created by the tax cuts, aid to the states, and other parts of the ARRA.”

So when the president said his stimulus bill “already saved or created” those jobs, he was just giving an estimate produced by his own economic advisers at the White House. Furthermore, the jobs figure is based on projections done at the time ARRA was passed. Recipients of ARRA spending aren’t required to report until later what they’re doing with the money and how well it’s working, so there’s very little hard data on where the money is being spent, let alone how many jobs may have resulted from the legislation. The CEA incorporated some actual spending reports into its estimate, but that information is not complete.

Translation: It was all a guess put out by his own administration. There’s no hard evidence, no actual record of how many jobs resulted from the ARRA. Obama could’ve pulled a 350,000 jobs saved claim out his posterior and there would’ve been just as much hard evidence.

Of course, this shouldn’t come as a surprise to anyone. Critics of the administration warned from day one that Obama’s “I’ll create or save millions of jobs” pledge was impossible to prove or disprove. He could claim to have saved or created 60 million jobs and, as long as at least 60 million Americans are employed at the end of his term, he couldn’t be proven wrong. And don’t think for a second that the administration is oblivious to that fact.

Via Hot Air Headlines.