I’ve talked about it before. Here is a classic example:
On July 8, Arthur Laffer writes on the op-ed page of the Wall Street Journal that the reason Americans who have been unemployed for six months or more haven’t found work is because the unemployment benefits they have been receiving encourage them not to look for work. In other words, the jobs are out there, but these people haven’t found them because they have been getting paid to stay home, and thus have not been out applying and interviewing for those jobs.
Today, the same paper, the Wall Street Journal, publishes an article (mostly behind their subscription firewall) titled “Three Million Imaginary Jobs,” the first paragraph of which reads as follows:
It may be that the last people in America who believe that the $862 billion economic stimulus of February 2009 created millions of net new jobs are Vice President Joe Biden and the staff economists in the White House. Yesterday, President Obama’s chief economist announced that the plan had “created or saved” between 2.5 million and 3.6 million jobs and raised GDP by 2.7% to 3.2% through June 30. Don’t you feel better already?
Of course, there isn’t a third article anywhere in the WSJ explaining how all those millions of Americans who have NOT been looking for work that IS out there, because they’ve been living the high life on $300 a week, are going to connect with those millions of jobs that actually AREN’T there because the editorial management of the WSJ would jump into the East River before admitting that the American Recovery Act did create millions of new jobs, and would have created millions more if the package had not been whittled down by craven Democrats trying to please Republicans who never intended to vote for the bill anyway.
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