"Obligations" sounded a bit too vague to NBC's White House reporter Chuck Todd. "Obligated, not necessarily spent yet?" he inquired.

"Right," Bernstein finally said. "Spent out is closer to $44 billion."

So here we are at midyear, and the administration has actually spent a little over 5 percent of its stimulus money -- a small fraction of what Obama said was needed to move the once-mighty $14 trillion economy out of its recession.

How much more will be obligated or spent this summer to meet the White House's 100-day jobs goal? "We're unable to make that estimate at this point," Bernstein says.

Let's return to Obama's 150,000-jobs claim. Keith Hall, commissioner of the Labor Department's Bureau of Labor Statistics -- whose job is to count the number of jobs there are in the economy -- was asked at a Joint Economic Committee hearing last Friday if he could substantiate that claim.

"No. That would be a very difficult thing for anybody to substantiate," Hall replied.

The very nature of spending-stimulus programs -- and the reason why they never work -- is that it takes a very long time for the money to travel through the government's bureaucratic pipeline to the states and localities and through the bidding process before any jobs are created. Obama's economists warned of this in policy position papers last year. By the time most of the money is "spent," the recession will be long over.

Only a fraction of the $800 billion will be spent in this fiscal year, which ends Sept. 30. Seventy percent of the money won't be spent until the end of the summer in 2010 when the administration says the economy will be growing again.

But in the end, despite the administration's belief it is creating net new jobs, each dollar it borrows or taxes out of the economy to create, in Joe Biden's words, "make-work jobs," is one dollar not available to the private sector to invest and spend on real, full-time jobs.