« Dems don't need the public option to take over health care | RNC chairman jumps on Hoffman bandwagon »
October 31, 2009
White House can't tell which jobs 'saved' or 'created' because of stim bill
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.
To comment on this or any other American Thinker article or blog, you must be a subscriber to our ad-free service. Login to your subscription to access the comments section. You can subscribe on a monthly basis for $6.79 a month or for a year at $69.99
Login
Subscribe / Change PwdAd Free / Commenting Login
FOLLOW US ON
Recent Articles
- Trump-O-Phobia Drives Some Americans to Questionable Greener Pastures Overseas
- A Businessman and a Brilliant Strategist
- A Remarkable Headline for a Fascinating Story
- Democrats Unmask Themselves
- How Mexico Became China’s Trojan Horse in U.S. Trade
- Covid Redux: The Bird Flu Scare
- A Taste of the Swamp
- Do We Have 677 Unelected Presidents?
- Global Relations beyond the Prime Directive
- The Democrat Party: The Enemy Within?
Blog Posts
- Near-death experiences, reliance on oil, and more cataclysmic failures—it’s all just part and parcel of ‘green’ energy
- So where'd America's obesity epidemic come from? Chef Andrew Gruel has a theory ...
- Trump just fired a huge warning shot over Iran’s bow
- Markets respond: Trumpian peace in Russo-Ukrainian war is in the bag
- The time of the hoax
- New York Times goes bipolar on Trump’s border control success
- Mark Kelly decides to offload his Tesla to protest Elon Musk
- The half-million dollar American
- Three things for the U.S. to understand about the Middle East
- Speaker Mike Johnson reveals why the Autopen scandal is a big deal
- The CDC website really needs to update its COVID protocols
- Hands in your back pocket
- Birthright citizenship: The facts
- ‘She’s my little Musk coupe’
- The Biden White House mixed it up with not one but two autopens