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.