Honesty

Reader comment on: Thomas Sowell's Latest

Submitted by ben (United States), Feb 2, 2010 09:06

Perhaps there is no way to tell exactly how many jobs were created/saved. The problem is when people assume because one can't give an accurate number, the stimulus must have failed. One does not lead to the other. What is dishonest is when politicians give hard and fast numbers for just about anything. When working on a macro-scale, giving specific data on jobs created, lives saved, abortions avoided, terrorist attacks prevented or just about anything else is an exercise in estimation. The President and his team are estimating, but that doesn't mean in any way that the underlying evidence that the stimulus helped the economy is wrong. Even conservative economists who advised McCain credit it with boosting GDP, and if it boosts GDP, some portion of that went towards jobs (it would have been more if it were direct spending as opposed to tax cuts. . . .). Nobody could ever figure out exactly how many job.

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