Economists have been worried that all the bailout spending might lead to inflation. That hasn’t happened yet, but President-Elect Obama’s job predictions have increased 64 percent in a few short weeks.
The media have been reluctant to call Obama on his vacillating job numbers [1] – first 2.5 million then 3 million, and never clear whether they would be “saved” or “created” jobs. Now the overall number of jobs predicted has jumped again, while the number of government jobs has somehow dropped.
Obama economic advisers Jared Bernstein [2] and Christina Romer [3] have come out with a new report that conveniently raised the number of expected job gains from 3 million to a possible 4.1 million.
That’s a hike of 1.6 million jobs or a 64-percent increase from Obama’s original prediction.
At the same time, as many as 190,000 new federal jobs went away. On Jan. 2, Obama said that he wanted to create 3 million jobs, with 20 percent of those in government. ABC’s Jake Tapper did the math and reported that as 600,000 new federal jobs.
“The No. 1 goal of my plan, which is to create 3 million new jobs, more than 80 percent of them in the private sector,” he says in the video. Then in his Jan. 8 economic speech, he backed off that government prediction. “That's why the overwhelming majority of the jobs created will be in the private sector, while our plan will save the public sector jobs of teachers, cops, firefighters and others who provide vital services.” He talked about creating private sector jobs and then he said he’ll just “save” public sector employment.
The new plan says [4] “a reasonable range for 2010Q4 is 3.3 to 4.1 million jobs created.” The new plan also says 90 percent will be private sector jobs, not 80 percent. In other words – at most 410,000 government jobs, not 600,000. According to the plan, “more than 90 percent of the jobs created are likely to be in the private sector.”
The Jan. 10 New York Times addressed [5] the point in part, but left out some of the waffling between numbers. “In the campaign, Mr. Obama vowed to create one million jobs, and after winning the election he put forth a plan to create up to three million. The report now puts the figure at roughly 3.7 million, the midpoint of an estimated range of 3.3 million to 4.1 million jobs by the end of next year.”