Yes, it does. Mr. Romney constantly talks about job losses under Mr. Obama. Yet [b]all of the net job loss took place in the first few months of 2009, that is, before any of the new administration’s policies had time to take effect.
This is unbridled tendentious sophistry from one of the New York Time's resident intellectual hacks, Paul Krugman (and kindred spirit to Kevin Graham) that Goebbles would have relished in its brazen (and easily refuted) mendacity (Krugman has a long and sordid history as an intellectually unprincipled political shill, first for Bill Clinton, for the Democrat party generally, and now for Obama)
For an idea - just one small example - of the astounding intellectual bankruptcy of this individual, one may profit by taking a look at the following statements by this "economist":
People on Twitter might be joking, but in all seriousness, we would see a bigger boost in spending and hence economic growth if the earthquake had done more damage.
World War II is the great natural experiment in the effects of large increases in government spending, and as such has always served as an important positive example for those of us who favor an activist approach to a depressed economy.”
“If we discovered that, you know, space aliens were planning to attack and we needed a massive buildup to counter the space alien threat and really inflation and budget deficits took secondary place to that, this slump would be over in 18 months,” he said. “And then if we discovered, oops, we made a mistake, there aren’t any aliens, we’d be better”
And yes, this does mean that the nuclear catastrophe could end up being expansionary, if not for Japan then at least for the world as a whole. If this sounds crazy, well, liquidity-trap economics is like that — remember, World War II ended the Great Depression.
Nonetheless, we must ask about the economic aftershocks from Tuesday’s horror [the 9/11 attacks]. These aftershocks need not be major. Ghastly as it may seem to say this, the terror attack — like the original day of infamy [the bombing of Pearl Harbor], which brought an end to the Great Depression — could even do some economic good.
http://www.libertariannews.org/2011/08/ ... struction/
Henry Hazlitt disposed of the core leftist economic fallacy in play here in chapter 3 of his masterful Economics in One Lession:
The Blessings of Destruction
So we have finished with the broken window. An elementary fallacy. Anybody, one would think, would be able to avoid it after a few moments’ thought. Yet the broken-window fallacy, under a hundred disguises, is the most persistent in the history of economics. It is more rampant now than at any time in the past. It is solemnly reaffirmed every day by great captains of industry, by chambers of commerce, by labor union leaders, by editorial writers and newspaper columnists and radio commentators, by learned statisticians using the most refined techniques, by professors of economics in our best universities.
In their various ways they all dilate upon the advantages of destruction. Though some of them would disdain to say that there are net benefits
in small acts of destruction, they see almost endless benefits in enormous acts of destruction. They tell us how much better off economically we all are in war than in peace. They see “miracles of production”
which it requires a war to achieve. And they see a postwar world made certainly prosperous by an enormous “accumulated” or “backedup” demand.
In Europe they joyously count the houses, the whole cities that have been leveled to the ground and that “will have to be replaced.” In America they count the houses that could not be built during the war, the nylon stockings that could not be supplied, the worn-out automobiles and tires, the obsolescent radios and refrigerators. They bring together formidable totals.
It is merely our old friend, the broken-window fallacy, in new clothing, and grown fat beyond recognition. This time it is supported by a whole bundle of related fallacies. It confuses need with demand. The more war destroys, the more it impoverishes, the greater is the postwar need. Indubitably. But need is not demand...As this is being written, in fact, printing money is the world’s biggest industry—if the product is measured in monetary terms. But the more money is turned out in this way, the more the value of any given unit of money falls. This falling value can be measured in rising prices of commodities. But as most people are so firmly in the habit of thinking of their wealth and income in terms of money, they consider themselves better off as these monetary totals rise, in spite of the fact that in terms of things they may have less and buy less. Most of the “good” economic results which people attribute to war are
really owing to wartime inflation. They could be produced just as well by an equivalent peacetime inflation.
The foundation of this entire sorry intellectual mess is, of course, the "broken window" economic fallacy:
A young hoodlum, say, heaves a brick through the window of a baker’s shop. The shopkeeper runs out furious, but the boy is gone. A crowd gathers, and begins to stare with quiet satisfaction at the gaping
hole in the window and the shattered glass over the bread and pies.
After a while the crowd feels the need for philosophic reflection. And several of its members are almost certain to remind each other or the baker that, after all, the misfortune has its bright side. It will make
business for some glazier. As they begin to think of this they elaborate upon it. How much does a new plate glass window cost? Fifty dollars?
That will be quite a sum. After all, if windows were never broken, what would happen to the glass business? Then, of course, the thing is endless. The glazier will have $50 more to spend with other
merchants, and these in turn will have $50 more to spend with still other merchants, and so ad infinitum. The smashed window will go on providing money and employment in ever-widening circles. The logical
conclusion from all this would be, if the crowd drew it, that the little hoodlum who threw the brick, far from being a public menace, was a public benefactor.
Now let us take another look. The crowd is at least right in its first conclusion. This little act of vandalism will in the first instance mean more business for some glazier. The glazier will be no more unhappy to learn of the incident than an undertaker to learn of a death. But the shopkeeper will be out $50 that he was planning to spend for a new suit. Because he has had to replace a window, he will have to go without the suit (or some equivalent need or luxury). Instead of having a window and $50 he now has merely a window. Or, as he was planning to buy the suit that very afternoon, instead of having both a
window and a suit he must be content with the window and no suit.
If we think of him as a part of the community, the community has lost a new suit that might otherwise have come into being, and is just that much poorer.
The glazier’s gain of business, in short, is merely the tailor’s loss of business. No new “employment” has been added. The people in the crowd were thinking only of two parties to the transaction, the baker
and the glazier. They had forgotten the potential third party involved, the tailor. They forgot him precisely because he will not now enter the scene. They will see the new window in the next day or two. They will
never see the extra suit, precisely because it will never be made. They see only what is immediately visible to the eye
Much of our economy, and the world's economies, have been constructed on precisely very complex, sophisticated versions (backed by, as you might surmise, mathematical econometric models and computer projections) of the broken window fallacy, combined with Marxian and quasi-Marxian nostrum about "social justice." The 2008 collapse was but one episode in a long and growing "boom and bust" history of western economics the groundwork for the next of which was initiated even as the original collapse was underway.
Keep in mind as well that, while Bush bears some fault for the present crisis (as does the Republican congress he led), the original epicenter of the economic collapse - the sub-prime mortgage meltdown - was a long term Democratic party/left-wing activist created (think ACORN) debacle that reached all the way back to the Carter years (numerous "affordable housing" initiatives) that emanated from and included various congressional initiatives, HUD, the Justice Department, Fannie and Freddie, the CRA, and continual activist pressure from community organizing groups such as ACORN) and the Keynesian deficit spending and massive tax increases favored by Obama and his sycophants have (as they must) only made the situation much worse than it otherwise would have been - just as similar programs prolonged and deepened the Great Depression.
The housing meltdown was a government created artificial bubble that is even now, being re-inflated, along with a over 15 trillion debt, nearly six of which has been created in just 3 years.
Keep in mind too that no job created with either tax revenue or phantom fiat dollars represents real wealth creation. It does represent "job creation," but government financed job creation has nothing to do with economic growth. Its entirely a wealth shifting, wealth redistributing exercise in economic circularity, taking from Peter, given in to Paul in the form of a paycheck financed with money already extracted from the private sector somewhere else, and reinserted - after overhead, waste, fraud, and abuse within the bureaucracy, into the economy and to a worker in the form of a paycheck.
None of this "job creation" is actually net wealth creation, and can in any real way be understood to be involved in economic growth and expansion - what a declining economy actually requires.
In point of fact, since Obama has been in office, the economy has lost a net 3.5 million jobs, including at lest a million jobs in the construction sector alone. There have been some gains. Obama would like to take credit for a gain of 1.6 million primarily low wage service sector jobs (Heath Care & Social Assistance, Waste Services, Employment Services, Leisure & Hospitality, and retail) over a carefully cherry picked 19 month time frame, but these areas are not where most of the original job losses occurred, which were in the goods/commodities producing sectors of the economy, where most wealth is actually created, and in the high wage construction trades.
Those jobs are gone, for the present, and there is no way Obama can credit his policies for adding either to any of that job creation unless he can show a direct link between his stimulus bill and the paychecks those employees are receiving. And, if there is a direct link, let him claim that his policy has created that job, but let's not fool ourselves into believing that this represents economic growth or new net wealth creation, and is anything but wealth redistribution to someone here, at the expense of someone else there.