Gibbs & The Swampettes

There is much smirking and hilarity over at The Swamp, which often functions more like a cheerleading section for an unprofessional, uninformed, condescending and vicious press secretary Robert Gibbs and the Obama administration than as the journalists they purport to be--let's call them the Swampettes.

As far as the GOP alternative, go ahead and laugh, but the debt we're facing will sink this country and lots of institutions with it. Given the GOP doesn't have the votes to pass any kind of budget alternative on its own, why is the administration even engaging them at all? The answer is members of the Obama administration's own party have grave reservations about this crushing level of debt and spending. This is a dishonest budget, and it's not the first time--aside from the stimulus bill being mostly about pork and payback for corrupt unions, the dishonesty of its claims of job creation are so astonishing even the cheerleaders at AP are taken aback:

If space exploration were conducted like the job forecasts under the government’s new stimulus law, man surely would have missed the moon. But this isn’t rocket science.
No promise from President Barack Obama is more important to the wounded economy than his vow to save or create some 3.5 million jobs in two years. In support of that bottom line, the government even tells states how many jobs they can expect to see from the spending and tax cuts.
But precise trajectories are impossible to plot and even approximations can be wildly off, as the authors of these forecasts acknowledge, usually more readily than the policymakers who use them to promote the plan.

Flip through the stacks of economic analyses underpinning the stimulus plan and you find a lot of throat-clearing qualifications and angst:

_”Very uncertain.”

_”Difficult to distinguish among alternative estimates.”

_”We confess to considerable uncertainty.”

_”Subject to substantial margins of error.”

In other words, who really knows?

Economic modeling may prove to be a haywire navigational device in this crisis.
“Large fiscal stimulus is rarely attempted,” Douglas Elmendorf, director of the nonpartisan

Congressional Budget Office, told lawmakers. “For those reasons, some economists remain skeptical that there will be any significant effects, while others expect very large ones.” Zero to nirvana? Even for economists, who routinely differ among themselves, that’s a range beyond the norm.

The disconnect between theory and real life became evident when Obama pitched his plan at a Caterpillar factory before its passage and held out hope the federal stimulus money would let the heavy equipment maker rehire some of the thousands being let go. Although that might be the eventual result when money courses through the pipeline, Caterpillar last week announced 2,400 more layoffs.

The GOP is presenting a detailed budget next week. You can bet the math and the policy will be honest.