Nothing captured quite so perfectly the manic state among those eager for the passage and implementation of the so-called “stimulus” as the wild remark by Nancy Pelosi, the speaker of the House, that “every month we do not have an economic recovery package, 500 million Americans lose their jobs.”
There are only 300 million Americans in all, among them 75 million under the age of eighteen and 36 million over the age of sixty-five. The number of employable Americans is thus somewhere around 190 million. If one were to calculate using Pelosian math, by the end of this month alone, the United States would be facing an unemployment rate approaching 1,200 percent.
“I do not think we can move fast enough,” Mrs. Pelosi added. That is literally true, although substantively false. Literally true, because it would not be possible without the application of a physics yet to be discovered to create hundreds of millions of Americans in one fell swoop and then instantly destroy their jobs.
Her words are substantively false, however, because “we” certainly can move all too fast. What matters here is the perspective of the observer. Pelosi surely would have thought a bill that radically cut marginal tax rates in response to the deepening recession would have passed too quickly even if it had taken two years to reach the President’s desk.
Of course, Pelosi’s “500 million” remark was a slip of the tongue; we all have them, and most of us do not have them when we are being filmed, and so perhaps she should be cut a little slack, for, as Hamlet put it, “Use every man after his desert, and who should escape whipping?”
But it was an instructive slip nonetheless. It is more than bad enough to note that, should the unemployment rate rise by the number of half a percentage point every thirty days, the current horrific pace, something like 600,000 Americans would lose their jobs each month. Why would Pelosi’s unconscious therefore direct her tongue to such a bizarre exaggeration?
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