AP: Stimulus jobs can't be measured

No one knows if any of those "shovel ready" projects promised by President Obama have started. I don't believe any of them have. Perhaps they don't have shovels?

As for the promised jobs tied to the stimulus? Well, I'll let AP take it from here.

If space exploration were conducted like the job forecasts under the government's new stimulus law, man surely would have missed the moon. But this isn't rocket science.

No promise from President Barack Obama is more important to the wounded economy than his vow to save or create some 3.5 million jobs in two years. In support of that bottom line, the government even tells states how many jobs they can expect to see from the spending and tax cuts.

But precise trajectories are impossible to plot and even approximations can be wildly off, as the authors of these forecasts acknowledge, usually more readily than the policymakers who use them to promote the plan.

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