Back in July, Nancy Pelosi elicited loud, and well deserved guffaws for saying that "unemployment benefits creates jobs faster than almost any other initiative you can name."

Barack Obama echoed those sentiments yesterday, claiming that unemployment benefits would create more jobs than the Keystone XL pipeline.

Washington Examiner:

President Obama said that he will delay his vacation and keep Congress in session until the passage of his desired payroll tax cut and unemployment benefits extension -- two proposals that Obama said would create more jobs than the Keystone XL pipeline that his administration recently delayed.

"I would not ask anyone to do something I'm not willing to do myself," Obama said when asked if he would go on vacation while keeping Congress in Washington D.C. "We are going to stay here as long as it takes [to get unemployment extended and pass the payroll tax cut]."

As Obama called for passage of those bills, he also responded to a recent Republican push to require him to approve the construction of the Keystone XL pipeline from Canada. "However many jobs might be generated by a Keystone pipeline," he said, "they're going to be a lot fewer than the jobs that are created by extending the payroll tax cut and extending unemployment insurance."

For the record, it is estimated that Keystone would create about 200,000 jobs.

One might expect a clueless congressman to say such an inane thing, but the president of the United States? There is no one in the White House, least of all Obama, who knows how to get the economy moving again. Unless it involves massive expenditures of public money, they are out of ideas.