So what else is new? Still, the breathtaking mendacity of this crew just keeps getting worse. The Emperor Hussein and his fawning courtiers live in a typically Leftist fantasy land, in which reality counts for nothing and “reality” for everything. From the WaPo‘s fact checker, Glenn Kessler:
The Fact Checker frequently warns readers to be wary of claims by politicians that various policy initiatives will yield tens of thousands of jobs. Such claims are often based on studies that rely on a variety of assumptions, any of which can be called into question. So we were interested when we received a call from a reader who wondered how the administration calculated that a proposed international trade agreement, known as the Trans-Pacific Partnership, would support some 650,000 jobs…
Asked about the statistic on 650,000 jobs, the White House referred us to the Office of the U.S. Trade Representative. USTR spokesman Matthew McAlvanah directed us to page 58 of the book. “They do not provide an estimate on jobs,” he acknowledged. “However they do provide a methodology that one could use.”
Ah… a methodology! The mediocre academics who make up the guts of the administration return to their comfort zone — imaginary numbers!
Essentially, the book suggests that an income gain of $121,000 would be “roughly equivalent to creating an extra job.” So the Obama administration took the figure of $77.5 billion and divided it by $121,000, which yields 640,000. Rounded up, that becomes 650,000.
There’s just one problem: This is the incorrect way to use Petri’s research, especially when officials such as Kerry combine the jobs figure in the same sentence as the income prediction: “The TPP could provide $77 billion a year in real income and support 650,000 new jobs in the US alone.”
That’s because the calculation on jobs can only be done if one assumes that wages have been frozen and there is no income gain. So it’s completely misleading to suggest there would be both a gain in income and a gain in jobs.
My God, these people are incorrigible. And shameless. And, let’s just say it — as stupid as only credentialed morons can be.
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