Who else? Jonathan Weisman:
Romer Predicts High Jobless Rate Through Election Year: The Romer testimony appears to be a shift toward the negative for the administration. On Tuesday, White House economist Jared Bernstein took a more upbeat position in a talk before the New America Foundation. While he called the lack of job creation “the most important challenge we face,” his speech emphasized progress made, not stagnation ahead. “I think we have to give the Recovery Act some props,” he said. “In the second quarter, the average monthly change in jobs was about 170,000 less bad than the baseline forecast. For the third quarter, the actual was about 270,000 better than the baseline. That’s about 1 million jobs saved or created so far”...
From the Christy Romer testimony that Jonathan Weisman was, ahem, "covering":
What kept the economy from heading into a second Great Depression in 2008 and 2009 was the strong and timely policy response.... A key piece... was the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act... $787 billion...to counteract the shortfall in aggregate demand... the boldest countercyclical fiscal action in American history.... [Our] estimates suggest that the ARRA added two to three percentage points to real GDP growth in the second quarter and three to four percentage points to growth in the third quarter.... [A]s of August, the ARRA had raised employment relative to the baseline by between 600,000 and 1.5 million jobs...
Add up Jared's monthly numbers and you get the midpoint of Christy's range.
You know, if you are going to say: "X said something different from Y. X said Z." Then--unless you want everyone to conclude that you are a liar or an idiot--you check to make sure that Y said something different from Z. It's not a hard principle to grasp. It's not hard to do.
Is it too much to ask Rupert Murdoch's Wall Street Journal to have reporters who actually listen to what people say and read the texts they are handed? Apparently.
Why oh why can't we have a better press corps?
