by Charles Krauthammer
The Corner/NationalReview.com
From Friday’s Fox News All-Stars:
Charles on Christina Romer’s statement that the stimulus would have little effect in 2010:
The administration was trying to explain away for months why it spends almost $1 trillion and there is no effect — [with] numbers showing increasing unemployment relentlessly.
So the line was: Well, it’s kicking in next year, it will all kick in next year.
And now we get the chief economist at the White House telling us that it’s already had its effect and next year it [the stimulus’ effect] will plateau and won’t have any effect on unemployment.
And you can only conclude that the stimulus is a bust. There’s no other conclusion. If it didn’t have its effect this year, and it’s not going to have an effect next year, then it had no effect — and we wasted $1 trillion.
On the administration claim that the stimulus saved 600,000 to 1,000,000 jobs:
That is angels on the head of a pin. This idea of saved jobs is completely unempirical. There’s no way to show it in any way in any model. It is an invention.
What you do is you look at real numbers. The real numbers show a radical increase in unemployment, and we’re told it is going to remain that way….
One thing that we know it did do which is indisputable, it added $1 trillion dollars on our deficit which will have an effect on unemployment in the future because it will increase our debt service.
The rest is at NRO.
