My. How unforgiving! David Brooks is not going to like your tone one bit, sir. Not one bit! Pethokoukis:

[…] Moody’s economist Mark Zandi, a favorite of the White House and congressional Democrats. Zandi’s research says the original $800 billion Obama stimulus created or saved some 2-3 million jobs. And he likes Stimulus 2.0 just as much. He claims it would “add two percentage points to GDP growth next year, add 1.9 million jobs, and cut the unemployment rate by a percentage point.”

Really? Seriously?

1) Of course, such analysis is based on garbage in, garbage out, Keynesian economic models. The results were already baked into the cake. Better to see what actually happened as gleaned from government statistics. In a recent paper, Stanford University economist John Taylor simply looked at whether, as a result of the 2009 American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, consumers actually consumed and whether government actually spent in a way that produced real growth and jobs. Turns out, they didn’t:

Individuals and families largely saved the transfers and tax rebates. The federal government increased purchases, but by only an immaterial amount. State and local governments used the stimulus grants to reduce their net borrowing (largely by acquiring more financial assets) rather than to increase expenditures, and they shifted expenditures away from purchases toward transfers. Some argue that the economy would have been worse off without these stimulus packages, but the results do not support that view.

2) Economists from George Mason University also looked at the real-world results of the ARRA by surveying employers. Their findings:

Hiring isn’t the same as net job creation. In our survey, just 42.1 percent of the workers hired at ARRA-receiving organizations after January 31, 2009, were unemployed at the time they were hired. More were hired directly from other organizations (47.3 percent of post-ARRA workers), while a handful came from school (6.5%) or from outside the labor force (4.1%). Thus, there was an almost even split between “job creating” and “job switching.” This suggests just how hard it is for Keynesian job creation to work in a modern, expertise-based economy: even in a weak economy, organizations hired the employed about as often as the unemployed.

3) And let’s not forget what Milton Friedman might have to say about this sort of deal, which gets to the heart of why Keynesian stimulus doesn’t work (via Wikipedia):

The permanent income hypothesis (PIH) is a theory of consumption that was developed by the American economist Milton Friedman. In its simplest form, the hypothesis states that the choices made by consumers regarding their consumption patterns are determined not by current income but by their longer-term income expectations. The key conclusion of this theory is that transitory, short-term changes in income have little effect on consumer spending behavior.

Team Obama thinks the whole package could boost growth by two percentage points. But the infrastructure spending and unemployment benefits will be a tougher sell. Republicans may well substitute their own stimulus ideas for those items so that the package ends up composed entirely of tax cuts.

The most likely addition is a temporary reduction in the taxes on foreign earnings brought back to the U.S. by its multinational corporations. The U.S. Chamber of Commerce estimates such a tax holiday could boost growth by a full percentage point next year. White House economists criticize idea as providing too little bang for the buck, but it could be the price for getting a deal. But an agreement can get probably get done, which would enhance perception of Obama as a leader and boost his approval ratings. Just don’t expect it to do much for America’s sputtering economic recovery.

Awesome: so the endgame here, just in case anyone’s been sleeping, is that a deal must get done — and trust me, the President will make certain needed concessions if he gets to show that he’s doing something, even if it is only after he demagogues the House a bit for “obstructing” this grand plan to buy jobs with money borrowed from future deficit spending.

Our entire political culture is just one iteration of a Ponzi scheme after the next — all played for power and access at the expense of the governed.

Until we elect a real reform-minded President, and give him or her the tools to dismantle the crony capitalist economy, beat back the establishment political class and their backroom bargainings, and oust the entrenched leftist bureaucrats, this country will continue its structural decline.

At which point — however “fixed” things may look for a time on the outside — all it will take is one final well-placed kick to bring the whole thing tumbling down.

And don’t think for a second the “progressives” aren’t busy diagnosing where best to strike — assuming that ObamaCare wasn’t already the final blow, and — like light from a dead star — we’ve just been fooled by the time lapse.