Obama the economic magician (OneNewsNow.com)

Obama the economic magician (OneNewsNow.com)

A leading free-market economist says President Obama is using sleight of hand to tout his economic "stimulus" package.


Barack Obama is promising to create more than 600,000 jobs through his $787 billion economic stimulus plan this summer. The president claims his stimulus has created or saved 150,000 jobs so far, but government reports show the economy has lost more than 1.6 million jobs since Congress approved funding for the massive stimulus program in February.

J.D. Foster, a senior fellow at The Heritage Foundation, says the president is doing a magician's trick.

"The key to a magician's work is to get you to look at one place while he's doing something elsewhere. So [Obama's] getting us all to look at the right hand of what government is spending; and in the classic models, when government spends a certain amount of money, you get a certain number of jobs. What they're trying to ignore is the other side, which is the government had to borrow the money to spend it," he points out. "And when it borrowed the money, the amount of savings in the capital markets were [sic] reduced, so the private sector didn't have access to that money, so it couldn't create the jobs. It's a reshuffling of jobs. They point to the increase; they ignore the decrease."

For President Obama to suggest he will create 600,000 jobs through fiscal stimulus at a time when the country will likely lose that many or more is "more than fantasy; it's chutzpah," Foster concludes.