The Recovery.gov site is still reporting 30,383 “jobs created/saved as reported by federal contract recipients.” The AP finds the figure to be comical:
The AP review found some counts were more than 10 times as high as the actual number of jobs; some jobs credited to the stimulus program were counted two and sometimes more than four times; and other jobs were credited to stimulus spending when none was produced.
For example:
_ A company working with the Federal Communications Commission reported that stimulus money paid for 4,231 jobs, when about 1,000 were produced.
_ A Georgia community college reported creating 280 jobs with recovery money, but none was created from stimulus spending.
_ A Florida child care center said its stimulus money saved 129 jobs but used the money on raises for existing employees.
There's no evidence the White House sought to inflate job numbers in the report. But administration officials seized on the 30,000 figure as evidence that the stimulus program was on its way toward fulfilling the president's promise of creating or saving 3.5 million jobs by the end of next year.
Calling a giant pork barrel giveaway an “economic stimulus” in the first place was arrant blather and so now is the idea of letting eager-beaver contract recipients guesstimate “jobs saved.” We all know twisting statistics for political ends is nothing new (only the most credulous trust GDP, unemployment, and inflation numbers anymore), but this purposeful and political destruction of standards needed to measure results – and keep public trust – is long past becoming a crisis.
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