Stimulus Supporters Seeking Cover Under Fuzzy Math and Word Play

There appears to be some rearranging of the deck chairs on the USS Stimulus. First this, yesterday, from ABC News:

The Obama administration has taken some heat and mockery for using the nebulous and non-economic term of jobs being “saved or created” by the $787 billion stimulus program.

So it’s gotten rid of it.

In a little-noticed December 18, 2009 memo from Office of Management and Budget director Peter Orszag the Obama administration is changing the way stimulus jobs are counted.

The memo, first noted by ProPublica, says that those receiving stimulus funds no longer have to say whether a job has been saved or created.

“Instead, recipients will more easily and objectively report on jobs funded with Recovery Act dollars,” Orszag wrote.

In other words, if the project is being funded with stimulus dollars – even if the person worked at that company or organization before and will work the same place afterwards – that’s a stimulus job.

And today this, as reported by the Wall Street Journal:

Assuming that Barack Obama holds another White House press conference—his last was back in July—here's a question worth asking: If the stimulus is truly the success you and your team claim, why are you so reluctant to use the word?

It's a timely question, with Congress returning to Washington this week after a year of record spending. Right now the spotlight is on the effort by the Democratic leadership to ram through a health-care bill—any health-care bill—in time for the president to declare victory in his State of the Union. But a second stimulus may not be far behind, with the House having already passed a version before members left for Christmas.

The House approved its $154 billion second stimulus package in its last vote of 2009, little more than a week after a policy address Mr. Obama delivered at the Brookings Institution. In that Dec. 8 speech, he reviewed the progress of the earlier stimulus—the $787 billion American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009—and used the occasion to call for additional congressional spending. The headlines rightly described what he was proposing as a "second stimulus."

Yet perhaps the most intriguing part of that speech is what the president did not say.

Not once did he use the word "stimulus." If you search under "speeches and remarks" on the White House Web site, it will tell you that the last time the president used the word "stimulus" in public remarks was in an offhand reference in a speech about clean energy in October. A month before that he used the term once in a speech that was about the stimulus. ...

Why the reticence? In itself, "stimulus" ought to be a political positive. After all, describing a bill as a stimulus assumes it will stimulate. Certainly that's the sense that Paul Krugman—a Nobel-winning economist and New York Times columnist—uses it when he complains that the first stimulus was too small.

Perhaps the reluctance to call the new package a second stimulus has something to do with the extravagant promises Mr. Obama made to sell the first. Less than a month into Mr. Obama's presidency, the first stimulus was pushed through partly on the promise that doing so would keep unemployment south of 8%. With Friday's jobs numbers, the same people who sold us that one now have to explain why keeping unemployment at 10% is progress.

The Journal article goes on, "It's classic Beltway. In Washington when your policies don't work, you don't change them. You change the name and hope nobody notices."

Thankfully, taxpayers can see through the smokescreens.