You've passed a $787B 'stimulus', and no one is seeing any results from all those dollars. Unemployment is 2% higher (or more) than you predicted it would be with the 'stimulus'. Before anyone sees the wool over their eyes it's vital to get the word out that, yes, indeed, the 'stimulus' really is stimulating, and the flood of jobs created (or saved) is simply astonishing. Why, look, the preposterously precise number is 640,239! The astonished populace sinks back, mouth agape, and praises the wonderful job being done on their behalf.
It all seems so easy. Until...
Until someone starts looking at the tabulation for all of those jobs. There we find this.
[O]fficials defended the practice of counting raises as saved jobs.
“If I give you a raise, it is going to save a portion of your job,” HHS spokesman Luis Rosero said.
Which is, of course, garbage.
The latest stimulus report, released Friday, significantly overstates the number of jobs spared with money from programs serving families and children, mostly the Head Start preschool program. The report shows hundreds of the programs used nearly $323 million to provide pay raises and other benefits to their existing employees.
The raises themselves were appropriate — the stimulus law set aside money for Head Start salary increases — but converting that number into jobs proved difficult. The Obama administration told Head Start officials to consider a fraction of each employee as a job saved.
That's desperation. "Nothing is happening. We've got to show results, darn it!" And considering the organization involved is Head Start, even if you grant the administration this ridiculous manipulation of the data, a little remedial math might be in order.
At Southwest Georgia Community Action Council in Moultrie, Ga., director Myrtis Mulkey-Ndawula said she followed the guidelines the Obama administration provided. She said she multiplied the 508 employees by 1.84 — the percentage pay raise they received — and came up with 935 jobs saved.
“I would say it’s confusing at best,” she said. “But we followed the instructions we were given.”
Confusing? No, rather it's pathetic that this person didn't know how to multiply by a percentage. Instead of multiplying by 1.84, the raise percentage, she should have multiplied by 0.0184, the decimal conversion of that percentage. This changes the jobs "saved" to 9.35.
Can we send those running Head Start back to school?
11/5/09 1700: It looks like more of the same with Wisconsin's numbers.
You have to love the example of the Parkland Sanitary District data being part of the White House claims. They took credit for 100 jobs that don’t even exist, at least 95 of which they overstated when the jobs really do begin. They took a 1900% markup on five phantom jobs — for a sewage project. If anyone doubted that the White House numbers were crap, this should utterly convince them.
More phantom jobs exist in Wisconsin’s data, all of it from contracts given directly from the federal government. One contractor claimed to have saved 24 jobs without receiving any money at all for that project, which may be the most efficient use of government funds in US history.
I think we can all agree on at least one thing: the number of jobs "saved or created" via the $787B 'stimulus' is somewhat less than 640,239. A lot less. If the number is not an out and out fabrication, it's certainly close.
