Here is a press report on an event in New Hampshire on Tuesday:

“Now, if you hear some of the critics, they’ll say, well, the Recovery Act, I don’t know if that’s really worked, because we still have high unemployment,” the president said. “But what they fail to understand is that every economist, from the Left and the Right, has said, because of the Recovery Act, what we’ve started to see is at least a couple of million jobs that have either been created or would have been lost. The problem is, seven million jobs were lost during the course of this recession.

Uh, no. Not “every” economist has said such a thing. In fact, it might be closer to say that no serious economist has said any such thing.

For Obama to pretend that what he says is true is not only wrong; it is quite ludicrous. The “saved or created” meme has rightly evoked belly laughs from all sorts of quarters. Even the president’s own Office of Management and Budget has given up on using it. And for good reason: It is an utterly meaningless and indefensible claim. The numbers were grabbed out of thin air, made up, pure fiction. The Obama administration has proven unable to document anything like what it claims.

For Mr. Obama — who promised to do away with “phony accounting” as part of his “turn the page” politics — to continue to say such things will simply further damage to his credibility, which is already in a state of considerable disrepair.

For more on this see ABC’s Jake Tapper and Hot Air’s Ed Morrissey.

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This entry was posted on Thursday, February 4th, 2010 at 2:01 PM and is filed under Contentions. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.