Government plays “fun with numbers”, and hopes you are too stupid to see through the BS.
The Government has attempted to paint the economic stimulus plan as a huge success. Before the bill was passed last year the Obama administration had proclaimed it would save or create upwards of nearly 4 million jobs.
NY Times – January 11, 2009
[…] In the campaign, Mr. Obama vowed to create one million jobs, and after winning election he put forth a plan to create up to three million. The report now puts the figure at roughly 3.7 million, the midpoint of an estimated range of 3.3 million to 4.1 million jobs by the end of next year. […]
But sadly it has not quite worked out as well as the Obama administration hoped for. So recently the Obama administration moved the goal post around the field and changed the definition of a job saved.
In December, the White House Office of Management and Budget changed its guidance, telling [stimulus money] recipients they should start counting every worker whose salary was funded with stimulus money, rather than guessing whether the jobs would have existed in the absence of the federal plan.
Tonight the WSJ reports:
Recipients of economic-stimulus money said 599,108 workers were being paid by the funds in the last quarter of 2009, fewer than the number of jobs attributed to the package in the seven months after it was enacted. The recipients’ reports, published on the official government Web site recovery.gov late Saturday. […]
In his State of the Union address to Congress last week, President Barack Obama said that "because of the steps we took, there are about two million Americans working right now who would otherwise be unemployed."
Those projections are based on macroeconomic models and try to include the number of jobs that exist indirectly as a result of people being hired to work on stimulus projects, or of people receiving food stamps or other aid funded by the stimulus program. […]
My note: Add to that those receiving stimulus money and reporting jobs being saved when
they were never in danger in the first place. The Obama administration is playing games with the numbers. Fuzzy math? This more like along the lines of trying to convince your teacher how you can put the square peg into the round hole.


