When you make a promise that can’t be tracked, you are then able to claim that you kept your promise:
WASHINGTON (Reuters) – President Barack Obama’s emergency spending measures last year saved up to 2 million U.S. jobs, the White House said on Wednesday…
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The White House, using two different approaches to figure out the impact of the stimulus package, estimates that U.S. employment had been raised by between 1-1/2 and 2 million jobs by the end of 2009 as a result of the stimulus measures.
Awesome. When they made a number up at the beginning of this mess, they did it because:
- They needed to sell this turd.
- They knew it was made up and couldn’t be tracked.
But serious, did they create jobs? Let’s look here:
While Massachusetts recipients of federal stimulus money collectively report 12,374 jobs saved or created, a Globe review shows that number is wildly exaggerated. Organizations that received stimulus money miscounted jobs, filed erroneous figures, or claimed jobs for work that has not yet started.
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But in interviews with recipients, the Globe found that several openly acknowledged creating far fewer jobs than they have been credited for.
One of the largest reported jobs figures comes from Bridgewater State College, which is listed as using $77,181 in stimulus money for 160 full-time work-study jobs for students. But Bridgewater State spokesman Bryan Baldwin said the college made a mistake and the actual number of new jobs was “almost nothing.’’ Bridgewater has submitted a correction, but it is not yet reflected in the report.
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In other cases, federal money that recipients already receive annually – subsidies for affordable housing, for example – was reclassified this year as stimulus spending, and the existing jobs already supported by those programs were credited to stimulus spending. Some of these recipients said they did not even know the money they were getting was classified as stimulus funds until September, when federal officials told them they had to file reports.
…several organizations that offer Head Start preschool programs and other services in Georgia reported retaining hundreds of jobs based on raises they gave their employees. In one such case, the Central Savannah River Area Economic Opportunity Authority in Augusta reported saving 317 jobs. But that represents the number of Head Start workers who received 2.3 percent raises from the stimulus funds, said Chris Whitley, the authority’s fiscal officer….
The White House has abandoned its controversial method of counting jobs under President Barack Obama’s economic stimulus, making it impossible to track the number of jobs saved or created with the $787 billion in recovery money.
Despite mounting a vigorous defense of its earlier count of more than 640,000 jobs credited to the stimulus, even after numerous errors were identified, the Obama administration now is making it easier to give the stimulus credit for hiring. It’s no longer about counting a job as saved or created; now it’s a matter of counting jobs funded by the stimulus.
That means that any stimulus money used to cover payroll will be included in the jobs credited to the program, including pay raises for existing employees and pay for people who never were in jeopardy of losing their positions.
“There were no jobs created. It was just shuffling around of the funds,’’ said Susan Kelly, director of property management for Boston Land Co., which reported retaining 26 jobs with $2.7 million in rental subsidies for its affordable housing developments in Waltham.
Take a look at some of those numbers. The first, in Boston, claims that they created 160 full-time jobs with 7 large. Did ANYONE check into that? And then the idea of counting jobs as saved simply because those people got a raise is insane. How does THAT make sense? And finally, we get the goods from the White House. In order to make their made up number, they are going to have to change their made up rules. And why not? It’s their rules to begin with.
Remarkable.