On Keystone, Obama just plain lies about jobs

Via the Minuteman and "Obama, Keystone economist" we find that the President granted an audience to the sycophants at the NY Times.  Here's what he said about potential job creation from the Keystone pipeline:

MR. OBAMA: Well, first of all, Michael, Republicans have said that this would be a big jobs generator. There is no evidence that that’s true. And my hope would be that any reporter who is looking at the facts would take the time to confirm that the most realistic estimates are this might create maybe 2,000 jobs during the construction of the pipeline -- which might take a year or two -- and then after that we’re talking about somewhere between 50 and 100 [chuckles] jobs in a economy of 150 million working people.

As Tom points out, the 2,000 construction jobs is some orders of magnitude below the State Department's own estimate and at least five times lower than the estimate of an anti-Keystone group.  Even so, Obama treats the pipeline itself as something that exists only for maintenance by a few dozen workers.  The long-term benefit to America would be adding high-paying "spin-off" jobs to the petroleum industry:

Spin-off jobs are jobs which emerge after the pipeline is complete and oil begins to flow.  These include refining, chemical manufacturing, petroleum transportation, and “petroleum dependent manufacturing.”  The last of these includes even factories that make use of petroleum even though these factories would use petroleum from elsewhere if the pipeline did not exist.  The presumption is that these jobs will increase because more petroleum is available.  On one hand, these jobs are better than the construction jobs for the actual project because they are considered permanent, but on the other hand, they are impossible to estimate because so many variable effect the process.

How many spin-off jobs may be expected?  A study by TransCanada estimates somewhere between 100,000 to 500,000.  But let's assume that the Canadians prevaricate as effortlessly as our President and say that it will only be 10,000 permanent jobs.  Is that something to sniff about?  I wonder how the unions looking to put men back to work would feel about Obama's casual dismissal of their livelihood.

Extra - Washington Examiner: "Obama low-balls Keystone job creation numbers, according to State Dept."