David Leonhardt and the Porkulus apologists

to borrow a quote from Barry O......

It really gets annoying to see how desperate some administration apologists are when it comes to casting the stimulus in the best light possible. Liberal columnist David Leonhardt seems to want to (in the words of Steve Spurriel) present himself as the admin's NY Times columnist in chief since Kruggie is now one of Obama's critics.

But while were on the topic of the Stimulus its best to revisit the various embarassments we have seen over the course of the program from disappointing results to wasted money to false PR claims made in desperation to hopelessly reassure an increasingly cynical public.

Once you've done that we should backtrack to some of the rather ridiculous claims used by Dave in his little NY times piece.

He cites job creation estimates from three research firms as gospel and then in my judgement misleadingly states that the CBO considers them to be conservative. First of all such estimates should be taken with a grain of salt given the rather imprecise nature of modeling which Arnold Kling elaborates on in this excellent post.

Russ Roberts has noted that the CBO has acknowledged that job creation estimates tend to be very imprecise ranging from 600K to 1600K(a pretty imprecise estimate). He also notes that the incoming data used by the CBO that was gathered since has barely improved our understanding of Porkulus's effects on the overall economy. Moreover as Veronique de Rugy of George Mason points out the CBO admitted that "it is impossible to determine how many of the reported jobs would have existed in the absence of the stimulus package"

Ignoring the cheap shot he takes and John Taylor n co he cites the work of Carmen Reinhart and Ken Rogoff without acknowledging that they have raised alarm bells about our current debt levels which Steve points out here.

Finally lets not forget about the other issues regarding the stimulus such as poor design, the fact that we had better options fiscal and monetary and the fact that the stimulus has done very little in the context of our recovery.

Now thats not change we can believe in Barry O.