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October 31, 2009

White House can't tell which jobs 'saved' or 'created' because of stim bill

Rick Moran
We knew that it was poppycock for the White House to claim that the stim bill "saved" any jobs at all. Now, they seem to be saying that their report yesterday that trumpeted 650,000 jobs "saved or created" is pure guesswork.

Eamon Javers writing at Politico:


White House officials announced Friday that they had counted exactly how many jobs were created or saved by recent stimulus spending: 640,329.
So how many were saved and how many created? They don't know.

In a briefing with reporters, officials acknowledged they can't tell the difference between jobs "saved," and jobs "created" by the $787 billion stimulus package.

They said they also can't tell the difference between private sector jobs and government jobs.

And they said that they had found and corrected significant errors in the data submitted in 57,000 separate reports to the federal government by Recovery Act funding recipients.

"I have dishpan hands, I've been scrubbing the data so hard," joked Ed DeSeve, a Senior Advisor to the President for Recovery Act Implementation. DeSeve said his staff found one error of over thousands of jobs in the data before it was released publicly, and asked the recipient to resubmit accurate information.

"The data isn't perfect," DeSeve said. "Further updates and corrections will be needed."

Critics have seized on the White House's definition of jobs "created or saved" to call into question just how great the economic boost from the stimulus has been, especially at a time when the unemployment rate is approaching 10 percent. But the White House is counting both kinds of jobs the same in its overall tally of the stimulus impact.

It is important to remember that these 57,000 reports are, for the most part, subjective. Who's to say a job wouldn't have been "created" without the stim bill? Not the recipient of the funds - especially if they expect to keep their place in line for more goodies from the government.

And the totally whacked out notion that anyone can say that a job has been "saved" by the stim bill is so outrageously transparent a political ploy that even the press isn't falling for it.

In their arrogance, the White House thinks they can put out any old set of numbers and the people will swallow them whole. They seem a little taken aback by all the criticism, whining that those who figured out that it cost $160,000 of taxpayer's money per job "created or saved" are practicing "calculator abuse." That's OK. Please don't "abuse" your calculator.

If you do the long division without using a calculator, you get the same figure: $160,000 per job.



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