Land of Make Believe: CBO Says 3.3 Million Jobs Created Last Quarter

Welcome to Fantasy Island.

President Barack Obama’s stimulus package may have created or saved as many as 3.3 million jobs last quarter and lowered the unemployment rate by as much as 1.8 percentage points, the Congressional Budget Office said.

The $814 billion program, known as the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, or ARRA, probably added between 1.7 percent and 4.5 percent to gross domestic product for the three months through June, the nonpartisan agency said in a report issued yesterday.

It may have, it could have, blah blah blah.

A look at that report; keyword throughout seems to be estimated.

So now when we get the next unemployment figure and it's unchanged or worse, it'll be unexpected.

ABC News, under the byline of a guy named Andy Sullivan, reports this as fact.

The massive U.S. stimulus package put millions of people to work and boosted national output by hundreds of billions of dollars in the second quarter, the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office said on Tuesday.

CBO's latest estimate indicates that the stimulus effort, which remains a political hot potato ahead of the November congressional elections, may have prevented the sluggish U.S. economy from contracting between April and June.

CBO said President Barack Obama's stimulus boosted real GDP in the quarter by between 1.7 percent and 4.5 percent, adding at least $200 billion in economic activity.

During that time the economy was growing at an anemic pace.

Gross domestic product rose just 0.6 percent during that period, according to preliminary Commerce Department data which economists expect will be revised sharply lower when new figures are released on Friday.

The massive package of tax cuts, construction spending and enhanced safety-net benefits was passed in February 2009 in the midst of the deepest recession since the 1930s.

Wait. Tax cuts? What tax cuts?