Yossi Gestetner

Obama and the Democrats credit the recent “better” job market to the Stimulus bill, but defend the-still-weak job market by saying that jobs are a “lagging indicator,” it lags the rest of the economy when it comes to improvements, therefore the Stimulus does not yet fully reflect in the job market.

The Problem is this: February, the month the stimulus was signed and before any stimulus money was dished out, the economy lost 60,000 jobs less than in January, and in March the economy lost even less jobs than in February. If the “logging indicator” excuse is true, why did the economy in March, the month stimulus money merely started rolling out, lose less jobs than it did in each of the two months before it? The March improvement cannot be attributed to the stimulus considering jobs are a lagging indicator. Right? It takes time for the Stimulus to reflect in the market.

Whichever way you will cook it, you are toast: if you use “lagging” as a factor, how/why did we get the March improvements? You will certainly have to agree that some (or most) of it happened on its own (just as February certainly did happen on its own, because February was before the Stimulus). If so, how much of the general improved job markets since then took place on its own, independent of Obama? Yet if you will say “logging” is not a factor and the better March number IS a direct result of the stimulus, why is the job market now, seven months into the Stimulus, still not doing better than it was in the months before the panic started last year September?

The answer is simple: the Stimulus failed to produce the job wonders Obama and the Dems assured us back in February. Did the panic that lasted from September 2008 through February 2009 subside? Is the job market now less bad than it was 10 months ago? Yes to both. But it is more from “natural causes” such as people getting over the shock waves of the Lehman collapse and the Medoff scheme (both of which generated the panic in the first place), than the Stimulus actually fueling a better economy. Heck, the New Orleans waters back in ’05 after Katrina receded before the Bush team took any action. Why? Because there is this much havoc that panic causes before things get less bad on its own. The same is with the job market: it started getting less bad on its own, back in February when it lost with 60,000 less than in January, before any Stimulus was spent, and is still less bad mainly on its own rather than the stimulus doing what it promised to do.