“There is no there there,” is what famed writer Gertrude Stein said when she returned to her childhood home in the 1930s. The same could be said of President-elect Barack Obama’s much-touted economic stimulus plan.

Though Christina Romer, the incoming chair of the Council of Economic Advisers and Jared Bernstein, the chief economist-designate to Vice President-elect Joseph Biden, offered an attempt at an explanation of job creation, it seems more circular than scholarly.

And, the detailed numbers, as tallied by Romer and Bernstein, may very well overestimate the impact on the economy. More about that later.

According to the outline of the proposal, the stimulus plan would add or save three to four million jobs by the end of 2010. That might sound like a lot, but in the last year, the economy lost almost 2.6 million jobs and household employment is down 2.9 million which means there are almost three million fewer people working today than a year ago. With forecasts suggesting those numbers will grow, the stimulus plan will barely bring us back to where we were.

That assessment, by the way, doesn’t include the growth in the working-age population: up almost 1.9 million in the last year. Combining the numbers suggests that the stimulus plan would fall short of keeping up with the natural population growth. By the time the plan has created or saved the jobs, the working age population will likely have grown by another 1.9 million, which means we will remain in labor doldrums.

Purists may argue this analysis mixes the two monthly payroll reports: jobs against employment. The jobs report is based on payrolls and reflects the number of paychecks issued each pay period. The employment report covers the number of people working and very often those are not the same. An individual with two jobs would be counted twice in the payroll report, but only once in the employment report.

The Romer-Bernstein report takes a three-step approach to estimating the impact on job creation and saving:

• A package with much-discussed components including investments in infra-structure, increases in food stamps and unemployment insurance, aid to states to alleviate cuts and prevent local tax increases, business tax incentives and a middle class tax cut.
• A model-based simulation of the effects of the package on the nation’s gross domestic product
• Translating the effect on GDP into job creation, acknowledging “not all of the increased output [GDP] reflects increased employment: some comes from increases in hours of work among employed workers and some comes from higher productivity.”

Romer and Bernstein used what they called a “relatively conservative rule of thumb that a 1% increase in GDP corresponds to an increase in employment of approximately 1 million jobs.”

Simply put, the plan is built on estimates of estimates with no direct job-creation programs, or at least none specified.

Their estimate suggests government spending equal to about 2.7% of GDP in each of  2009 and 2010, would boost the level of real GDP by the end of 2010 and even after that, the unemployment rate will still be at 7.0% (just under the current 7.2%) – and that’s not including the population growth. To be fair, Romer and Bernstein say without the package the unemployment rate would be 9.0% -- one percentage point higher than with the package -- and remain at that level for at least a year.

That leaves though the impact on the real economy. While the recession has largely been consumer driven, the types of jobs created by the stimulus plan -- as estimated by Romer and Bernstein -- don’t automatically correct that.

According to their analysis, about 1.1 million of the 3.7 million jobs resulting from the proposal will come in two sectors: retail and leisure-and-hospitality -- the two lowest-paying sectors in the economy, with average annual earnings of $19,948 (retail) $14,122 (leisure and hospitality).

And that isn’t exactly the stuff recoveries are made of.

Mark Lieberman is the senior economist for the Fox Business Network. Prior to joining FOX, he served as first vice president and manager of economic analysis and research at Washington Mutual in New York. Before that, he served as senior vice president at Dime Savings Bank of New York (which was later acquired by Washington Mutual), where he specialized in credit and risk management. He is a member of the Executive Committee of the New York Association for Business Economics. He has a degree in Economics from the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania.