So, you really have to work hard at lying or fibbing or misstating the facts to get the traditional media elites to come down hard on you when it comes to so-called "Free trade". Those elites have been cheerleaders for the rancid NAFTA-style trade deals going back three decades. But, the president has earned it when it comes to his claims about job benefits in the Trans Pacific Partnership: Four Pinocchios, considered "whoppers", from The Washington Post
Courtesy of The Washington Post came, just a few days ago (slipped under my radar), "The Obama administration’s illusionary job gains from the Trans-Pacific Partnership".
The claims:
“Estimates are that the TPP [Trans-Pacific Partnership] could provide $77 billion a year in real income and support 650,000 new jobs in the U.S. alone.”
–Secretary of State John F. Kerry, in an opinion article titled “Alliances for Peace,” Jan. 14, 2015
“Completing the Trans-Pacific Partnership provides the opportunity to open up markets, lower tariffs and, according to the Peterson Institute, increase U.S. exports by $123 billion and help support an additional 650,000 jobs.”
– Secretary of Agriculture Tom Vilsack, in an interview with the Greater Baton Rouge Business Report, Jan. 26, 2015
Essentially, the president, and his minions, were playing a shell game. They took an estimate from a book from Peterson Institute which included:
"...an estimate that, by 2025, the United States would experience a gain of $77.5 billion in income from TPP, as well as a $124 billion increase in exports. (More on those numbers, which are expressed in 2007 dollars, below.) But nowhere in the book does it says 650,000 jobs would be created[emphasis added]
And, then, with some sleight of hand:
Essentially, the book suggests that an income gain of $121,000 would be “roughly equivalent to creating an extra job.” So the Obama administration took the figure of $77.5 billion and divided it by $121,000, which yields 640,000. Rounded up, that becomes 650,000.
There’s just one problem: This is the incorrect way to use Petri’s research, especially when officials such as Kerry combine the jobs figure in the same sentence as the income prediction: “The TPP could provide $77 billion a year in real income and support 650,000 new jobs in the US alone.”
That’s because the calculation on jobs can only be done if one assumes that wages have been frozen and there is no income gain. So it’s completely misleading to suggest there would be both a gain in income and a gain in jobs.
The lack of credibility--the lying--that the president and his minions have on the topic of jobs is even more pronounced by the fact that the
Peterson Institute is undercutting the argument. The Institute gets its name from its principal funder, Pete Peterson, who has been the leading hysterical voice regarding the mythical dangers of deficits and the debt--hysterically calling for cuts in Social Security, among other things (I devote a full chapter to Peterson's nonsense in my book about
the scam of the deficit "crisis").
Even more relevant, the Peterson Institute is well-remembered by those of us who went through the NAFTA wars. It was that Institute that was the prime voice arguing about the wonderful jobs we would all see--we, Mexico and Canada--thanks to NAFTA (which, of course, proved to be entirely false, which anyone with a smidgen of a brain could have predicted).
Conclusion:
Clearly, with the Peterson Institute refusing to play the game this time and cough up a jobs number, the administration decided to concoct its own. But, as we have shown, one cannot at the same time claim both a gain of $77 billion in income and a gain of 650,000 jobs; the same effects simply cannot happen at once.
Moreover, these are big numbers with virtually no context. It is pretty lame to use such huge numbers to tout what, in the context of the U.S. economy, amounts to minuscule changes in income —10 years from now.
Our advice remains: be wary whenever a politician claims a policy will yield bountiful jobs. In this case, the correct number is zero (in the long run), not 650,000, according to the very study used to calculate this number. Administration officials earn Four Pinocchios for their fishy math.[emphasis added]
This stinker can only be sold and rammed through on the basis of lies. The jobs lie is particularly cruel, deceptive and politically manipulative because it clearly is intended to buy the votes of members of Congress who, to vote for this pile of crap, need to have some reason--and in the desperate straights people feel today, making a jobs argument is a tried-and-true, if deeply cynical, ploy.