Bad Arithmetic: Romney's Jobs Plan numbers Don't Compute - Joe Conason

[Bill USA]

http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/bad_arithmetic_top_romney_economist_admits_jobs_plan_numbers_dont_compute_2/

Romney’s economic program has three basic elements that he says will produce those 12 million jobs, as outlined in a TV ad quoted by Kessler:

First, my energy independence policy means more than 3 million new jobs, many of them in manufacturing. My tax reform plan to lower rates for the middle class and for small business creates 7 million more. And expanding trade, cracking down on China and improving job training takes us to over 12 million new jobs.”

In the studies cited by the Romney campaign, however, those figures practically debunked themselves.
The study that supposedly justifies the 7 million jobs produced by tax reform, written by a Rice University professor, covers a 10-year period—not four years. The study supposedly proving that his energy program will produce 3 million jobs is a Citigroup report that doesn’t even examine Romney’s plan; it includes fuel-economy requirements he has criticized and projects an 8-year timeline. And the International Trade Commission report that supposedly shows how an intellectual property crackdown on China will produce those final 2 million jobs is similarly distorted, using outdated employment figures and ridiculous speculation to reach a conclusion that even its authors warn is “unclear.”

For the coup de grace, Kessler quoted an email from Romney economic advisor R. Glenn Hubbard confessing that “the 3+7+2 does not make up the 12 million jobs in the first four years (different source of growth and different time period).”
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Maybe Romney's working with what mathematicians call imaginary numbers (like the square root of minus one... with imaginary numbers, and somthing you might call 'anti-math' (cf. antimatter), you can do things you can't do with real numbers (colloguial usage, not 'real' by the formal, mathematical definition) the rest of us are familiar with.