There’s been a great deal of chatter coming from the pundit class over President Obama’s admitting to the New York Times that there were really no “shovel ready jobs” waiting to be funded by his [anti] stimulus package. All of the discussion I have heard so far misses the point. The implication has been that Obama was wrong on the question of shovel ready jobs and this is why his plan didn’t work. This, of course implies that if there were all these projects ready to go Obama’s plan indeed would have given the economy the [language alert] kick in the ass that it needed.  But in fact the reason why Obama’s plan failed has nothing to do with a lack of shovel ready jobs. Shovel ready jobs or not, an economy cannot be stimulated by diverting money that would otherwise go to consumption, saving or investment in one part of the economy and dumping it on another–via the political bargaining process in Washington, of course. In other words, shovel ready jobs or not, what Obama called a stimulus plan was doomed to failure because it was impossible for it succeed, assuming, of course, that its goal was actually to stimulate economic growth and job creation. If, instead, its purpose was to increase the size and scope of government then it was a rousing success.