Too Complex To Fail?

ProPublica on the Obama administration's secret weapon for claiming economic success: nobody will ever be able to prove they failed!

[T]he Obama administration does have a rough estimate of how many jobs will be created by direct government spending. (For the record, $100 billion creates 1,085,355 job-years.) So what happens if its estimate differs from the direct job-creation reports? 

The answer, given by a senior administration official, is enough to make any social scientist squeamish: “It will be a two-way test of how good the numbers we get back will be and also a test of multipliers.” 

In other words, if the job-creation numbers the administration gets from real-world data disagree with its estimates, they reserve the right to blame the data. From an accountability perspective, this will make it difficult to assess the stimulus’ successes and failures.