That's an interesting question. When I quoted CBO numbers during the Bush administration, I was told the CBO was partisan. But no, I don't think they are. They do what they can with the parameters they are assigned.

This is the actual CBO report. It contains enough caveats to sink a battleship, and the CBO did the best they could to try and ennumerate a hypothetical, throwing economic models and algorithms at the problem.

But let's just take a look out the window instead. Obama has not "added" 3.3 million jobs. You see, if you create 100 new jobs, there are 100 more jobs on the payroll employment rolls today than there were yesterday. That's like, you know, math. In January of 2009 the number of payroll employees according to the BLS was about 133.5 million. Now if I add 3.3 million to that, I get 136.5 million. But when I look at the charts, the number of employees in September was 130.2 million. Now, I'm not a math wizard, but I'm seeing 6.3 million fewer jobs.

What Obama and by extension the CBO are trying to sell is the idea of the "saved" job. This is part of the larger approach which basically is trying to convince us that we would be in a much deeper hole if the Democrats weren't printing money hand over fist and pumping the deficit into a permanent trillion-dollar range.

No past adminstration has ever tried to invoke the unquantifiable "saved" job.

It's kind of funny, really. When Bush had three straight years without a negative payroll growth number, the liberals sneered about "bad" jobs. And here they're touting "virtual" jobs.

Even those don't stand up to close examination. This report is typical. There are others.

No, it's not possible to dump $800 billion into the economy without it ending up on somebody's paycheck. But what would that $800 billion have done in the private sector, invested on endeavors and jobs that actually create a profit and wealth?

A real job, one that will last and add to real economic growth, is one created to meet a real need, paid for by real wealth from the private sector, not make-work jobs paid for by money the government either borrows or confiscates from other businesses and investors.

The best way to create real economic growth is to get out of the way of the people who generate it.