*****BTW - NY Times has an article this morning on White House Forecasts NO Job Growth Until 2010*****
I'm still very upset about this saving jobs metric that President Obama based his entire trillion dollar budget/stimulus plan on. This is my third post on this and I got fired up on the "save job" metric this morning when I read this article in USA Today called White House Defends 3.5M Job Forecast. My first post was called AT&T Lessons for Obama on Saving Jobs and a second post called Are You Sure You Understand How Obama's Plan Will Save Jobs? The USA Today article shows the smoke and mirrors that the Obama administration is using/used to sell the "save job" metric (my comments in bold):
- 3.5 million create or save job forecast is based on a relatively conservative rule of thumb (I'm sure the forecast mechanism is conservative, the create a job metric you are forecasting is a bogus metric)
- Many Republicans have criticized the administration's projections as untrustworthy and politically motivated.(They key is not to attack how they made the projections, but attack the actual type of number they are trying to forecast)
- The figure of 3.5 million jobs saved or created, the report says, is the difference between the projected number of jobs during the last three months of 2010 with the stimulus and the projected number of jobs without if there had been no stimulus plan (You see the create "job metric" is the variable derived from two forecasted numbers one of which you can't ever accurately measure)
- The report also offers a new measure of the stimulus law's economic effects: 6.8 million additional job-years between the signing of the legislation and the end of 2012. A job-year represents one job held for one year. (Obama adds a new number that sounds huge to confuse people and have idiots argue over a new number that is derived from another bad number - saved jobs)
- The administration's practice of discussing jobs saved as well as created is "a very clever device for providing future political cover," The 'jobs saved' part was a way for them to say, 'The economy is still shrinking, but it would have shrunk faster but for the good things that we did.' (What I've been writing all along).
I worked at AT&T for 10 years and 4 years in an internet measurement, analysis group that was part of Bell Labs for a while. At AT&T the retention game was trying to estimate who was likely to leave (a saved job) in order to get retention funding. Winback was easier to measure because you actually so the customer return to AT&T (a created job). SAVED CUSTOMERS WERE DERIVED NUMBERS AND EVEN BELL LABS COULDN'T ACCURATELY FORECAST THAT. WHAT MAKES YOU THINK THE GOVERNMENT CAN FORECAST A SAVED JOB?
Obama can not forecast A SAVED JOB because you'll never know what would have happened if we didn't spend money to help the economy. It is a completely derived, fictitious number that was undoubtedly created using proven statistical techniques, but at the end of the day, we will never know how many jobs we would have lost.
This is the only talking point that matters for Republicans. This is the smoking gun for the Obama administration. The news will continue to report actual job lost or actual job created (still losing jobs and the Federal Reserve said it may hit as high as 10% and remain high for years). This is how we should market ourselves and attack the administration in 2010. Actual jobs created or not, actual spending, and how the administration sold the created jobs number as a way of passing the stimulus plan. Any other talking points that don't involve jobs and unemployment will fall flat on the masses of people and doom Republicans in 2010.
PardonMyFrench,
Eric
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