More Garbage-In-Garbage-Out from CBO

You don't need to watch old Gunsmoke episodes if you want to travel into the past. Just read the latest Congressional Budget Office "research" claiming that Obama's so-called stimulus "increased the number of full-time-equivalent jobs by 1.8 million to 4.1 million." CBO's analysis is a throwback to the widely discredited Keynesian theory that assumes you can enrich yourself by switching money from your left pocket to right pocket. For all intents and purposes, CBO wants us to believe their Keynesian model and ignore real world data. This is akin to the famous line attributed to Willie Nelson, who was caught with another woman by his wife and supposedly said, "Are you going to believe me or your lying eyes?"

Using its own Keynesian model, the White House last year said that wasting $800 billion was necessary to keep the unemployment rate from rising above 8 percent. Yet the joblessness rate quickly jumped to 10 percent and remains stubbornly high. We've already beaten this dead horse (here, here, here, here, and here) in part because the White House has embarrassed itself even further with silly attempts to find some way of turning a sow's ear into a silk purse. This is why Obama Administration estimates have evolved from "jobs created" to "jobs saved" to "jobs financed."

The CBO's most recent "calculations" are just another version of the same economic alchemy. But don't believe me. Buried at the end of the report is this passage, where CBO basically admits that its new "research" simply plugged new spending numbers into its Keynesian formula. This sounds absurd, and it is, but don't forget that these are the same geniuses that predicted that a giant new healthcare entitlement would reduce long-run budget deficits.

CBO’s current estimates of the impact of ARRA on output and employment differ slightly from those presented in its February 2010 report primarily because the agency has revised its estimates of ARRA’s impact on federal spending on the basis of new information. Outlays resulting from ARRA in the first quarter of calendar year 2010 were higher than the amount that CBO projected in February 2010 in preparing its estimate of the law’s likely impact on output and employment, primarily because a larger-than-expected amount of refundable tax credits was disbursed in the first quarter rather than later in the year. That change makes the estimated impact of ARRA on output and employment in the first quarter slightly higher than what CBO projected in February.