The more I think about it, the more I like the idea that instead of a Trillion Dollar stimulus package, we have a Trillion Dollar tax liability abatement program. Drop the tax rates across the board to generate a Trillion dollars in static tax reductions, and program it into people’s and businesses income streams by changing withholding or actual tax payments as appropriate. Yes, the devil will still be in the exact details, but it seems to me this approach at least has a chance of working whereas the current plan is worse than none, as it also has a fair chance of making things worse.

They can do a lot more than shave tenths. Use your union friends’ job training and apprenticeship programs, suck a bunch of people into them and pay them what would be their UI except now they’re in a re-training program. Ergo, they’re not unemployed any more. If you want the unemploymetn rate to go up, you gin up some estimate of disaffected workers. Right now they don’t count unless they’re actively seeking work through the unemployment office. If they stop checking in, they go off the unemployed rolls. The state agencies can do all sorts of stuff on their own, especially with a little help from their union friends.

Way back during the ’86 Oil Price Crash, Gov. Cowper, heavily backed by the unions, had told them all that he could not offer them a wage increase unless and until there was an increase in the Anchorage CPI, which was flat or even deflationary by some measures in those days. So, the unions all ginned up this measure styled CPI less shelter because housing devaluation was a major part of the drag on the state economy. We wouldn’t accept the measure. We go to interest arbitration with them. I don’t know to this day whether my then-director was in league with the unions or got blindsided, but he calls the head of the state function that does CPI calcs and such. So, here’s a State manager called as a State witness and the first thing he does is trot out a bunch of graphs showing CPI-less shelter supporting the union rather than the Administration’s position. They got their wage increase from the arbitrator, citing inter alia “the unrebutted testimony …”

Anyway, unions own departments of labor in the Blue states and have a lot of power over them in the unionized Red states.

Fiddling with the numbers at the margins won’t be enough to help the Dems here.

Short of completely making numbers up, nothing will help them on the unemployment rate (and just making numbers up would be easy enough to expose as fraudulent).

Bottom line: Statistics only buttress what people already know – if the Obama Admin reports a 4.5% unemployment rate, but everyone knows a slough of unemployed and laid-off people in their circle of acquaintances (because the real rate is 9%), something won’t jibe, and people won’t automatically just go with Obama’s numbers.

Come 2010, the unemployment rate is very likely to be 9-10% (at least, that’s what the “experts” are predicting – I have a sneaking suspicion that it’ll be even higher than that), and that’s with or without Obama’s useless “Roads to Nowhere” stimulus.

If unemployment is still over 9% (or, likely, even over 8%) by the winter/spring of 2010, the Dems will get slaughtered at the polls that year.

Watching the Dems try to explain the high unemployment rate a year from now, even after the passing of their “stimulus” package by Feb. of 2009, will be pure popcorn time…