http://www.wnd.com/index.php?fa=PAGE.view&pageId=116576It's official... the number of jobs "saved or created" that is being trumpeted by the White House has NO credibility at all. It's all a giant guessing game designed so that PresBo can claim a political victory where one doesn't exist.
What am I talking about? I'm talking about the massive problems, overstatements, and outright fabrications in their data. The latest example comes from a GAO report obtained by ABC news. According to this government report, many jobs were reported saved by agencies who spent no money, and thousands of projects spent hundreds of millions yet created no jobs.
http://abcnews.go.com/Politics/gao-50000-jobs-stimulus-projects-spent-money/story?id=9117506
The GAO report comes on the heels of weeks of reports, including some by ABC News, that question the validity of the job creation numbers the administration's economic recovery board says were generated by the stimulus plan.
- The new GAO report finds that 58,386 of the more than 640,000 "saved or created" jobs listed on recovery.gov are from stimulus projects where no money has yet been spent.
- On the flip side, the report finds nearly 10,000 projects that report spending a total of $965 million without creating any jobs at all.
The report also raises questions about how closely the contracts are being monitored. Twenty-five percent of the more than 130,000 primary contracts listed were not marked as having been reviewed by any government agency, and less than 1 percent of subcontracts were reviewed.
And the GAO says that estimating the impact of the stimulus is impossible... no matter what Obama tells you.
On Thursday, the GAO's Gene Dodaro will testify before the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee.
"Neither the recipients nor analysts can identify with certainty the impact of the Recovery Act because of the inability to compare the observed outcome with the unobserved, counterfactual scenario in which the stimulus does not take place," Dodaro says in draft testimony prepared for the hearing that was obtained Wednesday by ABC News.
Oh... and the guy responsible for tracking the effects of the stimulus package admits they can't verify the accuracy of the numbers.
http://www.politico.com/news/stories/1109/29674.html
The chief federal oversight official for the stimulus program said in a letter Wednesday that he can’t certify whether the number of jobs “created or saved” by stimulus funds is accurate.
Recovery Board Chairman Earl Devaney was responding to a request for information by Rep. Darrell Issa (R-Calif.), the top Republican on the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform. In a letter to Issa dated Nov. 17, Devaney wrote, “Your letter specifically asks if I am able to certify that the number of jobs reported as created/saved on Recovery.gov is accurate and auditable. No, I am not able to make this certification.”
The Obama administration claimed that it saved or created at least 1 million jobs this year. But errors in the stimulus job creation data have become a political hot potato, as the administration has been hit by news reports revealing that data it posted on recovery.gov includes jobs allegedly created in congressional districts that don’t exist.
As I've been saying for a while, now, White House claims of how many jobs were "created or saved" ARE MEANINGLESS... just numbers designed to make PresBo look good.
Politically motivated to make PresBo look good... that sounds like most of his Presidency so far, doesn't it?
UPDATE: Oh, and after proudly proclaiming 640,000 jobs "created or saved" and using that to shore up his political creds on the stimulus, what does he say now about all the errors in the numbers he used to MAKE this claim of success? They're a "side-issue."
http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2009/11/18/obama-calls-stimulus-data-errors-issue-says-focus-job-growth/
This is kinda like Vietnam body counts in 1968...which became worthless in the end. We probably killed the entire male population of North Vietnam three times over....if you took the true count.
ReplyDeleteI think this has run the same course. We've saved every single job in America...three times over...and yet it just isn't making us feel good. Kinda like the feeling with Nam.
Finally, as a statistics player...I am fully aware that you can take positive numbers, negative numbers, and imaginary numbers...turning this all into a work of art. You can also work up a mess...that folks quote...and then they fall apart when they realize the numbers don't work. Frankly, I have to ask myself....if this adds up to $95 for each saved job or $950 for each saved job, or $9500 for each saved job....then great. But it has to be a honest admission.