Scott Ott's Examiner Scrappleface: Obama hails phony stimulus jobs as faux GDP boon
By: Scott Ott
Examiner Columnist
November 20, 2009
News fairly unbalanced. We report. You decipher.
President Obama on Friday hailed the "amazing growth" in phony stimulus jobs, especially from nonexistent congressional districts, as a "sure sign that we're seeing a make-believe recovery and an encouraging spurt in faux GDP."
Faux gross domestic product usually trails other false economic indicators, the president said, but with projected unemployment plummeting, the federal government's top alleged experts predict ill-founded consumer confidence will bounce back "before the end of the year at the latest, and quite possibly before supper time tonight."
While Republicans and other skeptics have slammed the Obama administration's use of erroneous data to buttress its claims of an economic turnaround, the president said, "It's exactly this kind of data that the American people need to lift their spirits and to divert their attention from the looming collapse of our capitalist system ... which is, of course, not going to happen, as our latest reports demonstrate beyond a shadow of a doubt."
The president criticized his predecessor, George W. Bush, for "offering false hope without the fictitious numbers to back it up."
"My administration provides genuine false hope," Obama said, "and we've offered dubious supporting statistics, giving it a patina of credibility that has an intoxicating effect on those with a cursory knowledge of economics."
Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner has cautioned against "irrational exuberance about performing due diligence analysis on the administration's numbers," noting that "precision can mitigate against optimism and set up a kind of domino effect, with accuracy leading to caution, thus freezing markets and ultimately hindering the salutary effect that spurious figures can have on Wall Street."
Meanwhile, Democrats in Congress have reacted to the revelation that millions in stimulus cash reportedly generated thousands of jobs in congressional districts that don't exist, by noting that "those congressional districts don't exist ... yet," in the words of Sen. Harry Reid, D-Nev. "That doesn't mean they'll never exist. We Democrats see the glass as half full."
Examiner Columnist Scott Ott is editor in chief of ScrappleFace.com, the world's leading family-friendly news satire source.
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