Without fail, whenever good economic news is announced, online conservative* spin agents twist the words to attempt to blunt the effects of good news by trying to mislabel it as bad news.
For instance, this CNN article says that of the reports received of the stimulus, each job has cost $71,500 (national average).
The same page also says:
“The direct count by Recovery Act recipients of jobs created or saved from this small percentage of the Recovery Act exceeds our projections.”
My reaction to the news, is that this is kinda good news.
If the stimulus can somehow maintain that pace, it will create more than 11 million jobs. It won’t maintain that pace, but its an impressive beginning – and it represents less than 1% of the total stimulus.
The conservative reaction?
“Epic, complete, utter failure and a waste of a trillion dollars.” (math problems, propagandist)
“Hold yer horses there…where’s the other 970,000 jobs ?” (reading problems, didn’t notice that the 30,000 jobs were created with 0.002% of the stimulus)
“At 70,000/per job – absolute failure, no other way to look at it.”
“This is pitiful it really is and to still have almost 10% unemployement when this was suppose to keep it at 8” (EVERYONE had their projections wrong. NOBODY expected unemployment to reach 9.5% at the beginning of the year – its a stupid comment)
“How is that “great”? 1 year into the recession and only 1 % spent? THAT is what I call failure. And no, it was 30% as of last month or so.” (math problems, reading problems)
“The rate is atrocious.”
So much failure to understand math.
Its really depressing.
The same thing happened when the number of new unemployment claims went down unexpectedly a couple months back. Conservative propagandists tried to spin that into bad news.
*I say conservative because they aren’t liberal and I’m not sure if they are republicans or libertarians or something in between.
