The New Voodoo Economics: Jobs ‘Saved’ by Federal Stimulus Dollars

by Amber Gunn

The federal website that tracks the final destination of the $787 billion “stimulus” package reported more than 640,000 jobs were created or saved by the funds as of October 30. A closer look at one state’s reporting, however, should cast serious doubt on that number’s veracity.

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Washington state is listed as the third-highest job-generating state, according to www.recovery.gov, which records the number of jobs created or saved as 34,517.13. The problem is that at least 24,000 of those jobs were not really in jeopardy.

You read that correctly.

Washington’s main adviser on stimulus projects, Jill Satran, told the Tacoma News Tribune that state officials used a portion of the stimulus dollars to fund the paychecks of 24,000 teachers who were already under contract to finish out the school year. Without the stimulus money, the state would have had to pick up the tab anyway.

Cuts would have occurred elsewhere, but the job losses resulting from those cuts are not easily quantifiable, Satran said. “It would not likely have come from those teachers,” she said.

The spokeswoman for the Recovery Accountability and Transparency Board—the one that unilaterally amended the Recovery Act to extend the reporting deadline mandated by law—said that the board had issued “guidelines” for calculating jobs created, but had not made any effort to fact-check the job numbers they’ve received. She called Washington’s choice to include 24,000 teachers in its job count “a state political issue.”

The Board’s job, as its members see it, is simply to post what was reported to them.

Even White House officials acknowledge that states and localities have made various reporting errors, noting that there are no consistent standards for recipients to determine a “saved” job versus a “created” job.

But what the Board posts on Recovery.gov is cited by newspapers and media outlets all over the country. Remember that next time you read about jobs saved or created by stimulus dollars.

The truth is that measuring the success of the stimulus program is generally defined by its proponents as the number of jobs created; yet this number is barely quantifiable by recipients, let alone verifiable by independent sources. (Not to mention the fact that governments can’t create jobs; they can only transfer wealth).

Last week alone, I single-handedly created 25,000 jobs and boosted GDP by .05%. All it cost me was four fainting goats, a rooster and an hour of voodoo incantations. Don’t believe me? Prove me wrong.

For all of the government’s efforts to show Americans how politicians are abusing, er, using their dollars, the reported job numbers are turning out to be fanciful creations of bureaucratic imagination—like asking fat people to self-report the amount of calories they eat in a day. Yeah, that’s going to be accurate.


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Posted Nov 10th 2009 at 12:13 pm in Congress, Economics, News, Politics, State Politics | 26 Comments