The American Pundit

The thing about Biden isn’t that he’s stupid. It’s that he personally lacks any political sense. He doesn’t know when to keep his mouth shut for his own political benefit. It’s not intentional honesty as some apologists wish to claim; he’s not making a conscious effort at transparency. No, he’d keep quiet if he knew that he should. He just doesn’t lack the political sense to know not to bring this sort of thing up.

NEW YORK (Reuters) – Vice President Joe Biden acknowledged on Tuesday that some waste is inevitable in the spending of a $787 billion economic stimulus package, in a characteristically blunt assessment.

“We know some of this money is going to be wasted,” Biden said during a roundtable discussion in New York with business leaders aimed at promoting the two-year stimulus plan…

Biden said transparency and accountability are key to the program’s success.

“There are going to be mistakes made,” said Biden. “Some people are being scammed already.”

Reuters actually bothers to point out that just about every Republicans opposed porkulus, mostly out of fear for wasteful spending and concern over a deficit already growing exponentially. Now we’re being told that money is being wasted, people are getting scammed, China’s laughing at claims that their investments in the U.S. are safe, we’re borrowing half of everything we spend, our AAA bond credit rating is at risk, and our national debt is over $11.3 trillion. Never mind the fact that unemployment is on the rise, no new job creation is expected through the rest of the year, and major corporations are still going into bankruptcy.

And what about those “created or saved” jobs figure of 150,000? Tony Fratto reminds us that the White House is pulling the figure out of its ass.

There is only one necessary data point to make the “jobs-saved” claim: an accurate measure of expected employment levels in the future. That baseline data is critical to measure what the employment level would be in the absence of the stimulus. Unfortunately for the White House, they cannot possibly know that measurement within any degree of confidence — and they know it.

To understand just how unknowable this data point is, it’s not necessary to be an economist, a mathematician or a statistician.

You only need to know this: the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) – thousands of the most professional and rigorous counters and analyzers of labor data in the history of mankind – makes TWO revisions of employment data for their ESTIMATE of the PREVIOUS month! And even then the reports are mere estimates – an annual benchmark survey is required to reset the nation’s payroll baseline.

That is, the best employment statisticians the world has ever known, people whose lives are dedicated to employment data, conducting labor surveys and research, constantly refining their complex models, have a difficult time telling you how many jobs were created in the PAST!

Via Hot Air.