"I WILL SAVE 600,000 JOBS BY THE END OF SUMMER"
Obama repackaged old promises today, of creating/saving 600,000 jobs by summers end. Funny thing, the stimulus package that passed in February was to create/save 3.5 million jobs, but even with the huge bailouts and mighty government spending unemployment is rising. Obama sensing that the American people are starting to show their anguish by dropping approval ratings, Obama continues the newspeak.
Newspeak defined by Merriam-Webster dictionary:
new•speak (’nü-”spEk, ‘nyü-), noun, Usage: often capitalized. : propagandistic language marked by euphemism, circumlocution, and the inversion of customary meanings. Etymology: Newspeak, a language “designed to diminish the range of thought,” in the novel 1984 (1949) by George Orwell. Date: 1950
Create/save, is like having it both ways, Obama cannot lose. Why you ask? Because job creation can be measured at a specific point in time, but job saving sounds good but is unmeasurable.
On February 19, 2009, Greg Mankiw a economics professor at Harvard University wrote in his blog the seminal article on "Create and Save."
Question: The American people have seen hundreds of billions of dollars spent already, and still the economy continues to free-fall. Beyond avoiding the national catastrophe that you've warned about, once all the legs of your stool are in place, how can the American people gage whether or not your programs are working? Can they — should they be looking at the metric of the stock market, home foreclosures, unemployment? What metric should they use? When? And how will they know if it's working, or whether or not we need to go to a plan B?
Answer: I think my initial measure of success is creating or saving 4 million jobs. That's bottom line No. 1, because if people are working, then they've got enough confidence to make purchases, to make investments. Businesses start seeing that consumers are out there with a little more confidence, and they start making investments, which means they start hiring workers. So step No. 1, job creation.
The expression "create or save," which has been used regularly by the President and his economic team, is an act of political genius. You can measure how many jobs are created between two points in time. But there is no way to measure how many jobs are saved. Even if things get much, much worse, the President can say that there would have been 4 million fewer jobs without the stimulus.
Political genius indeed or newspeak genius, Obama is having it both ways when he says he is saving jobs even though thousands upon thousands of Americans have lost their job. The newspeak continues . . .
-LEX REX
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