This just in–not only is the federal government no good at “creating or saving” jobs with tax dollars, but they’re also no good at counting the scant few jobs that actually were (maybe) created with those dollars.
From the AP today (emphasis mine):
An early progress report on President Barack Obama’s economic recovery plan overstates by thousands the number of jobs created or saved through the stimulus program, a mistake that White House officials promise will be corrected in future reports.
The government’s first accounting of jobs tied to the $787 billion stimulus program claimed more than 30,000 positions paid for with recovery money. But that figure is overstated by least 5,000 jobs, according to an Associated Press review of a sample of stimulus contracts.
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.
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There’s no evidence the White House sought to inflate job numbers in the report.
Of course there’s no evidence that the White House itself purposefully inflated the numbers. None that the AP sees, anyway. But absence of evidence is not itself evidence of absence, right? And besides, what interest would the White House possibly have in fudging numbers like this? I mean, really. Get your mind out of the gutter.
And through it all, remember that these folks in Washington, who had the audacity to purport to be able to quantify a “saved job” to begin with, are the same people now clamoring to take over every aspect of your lives.
They can do it better than you.
Didn’t you know that?
