The Swine Line

Way back when the “stimulus” bill was first proposed, Citizens Against Government Waste (CAGW) advised taxpayers that this would be filled with wasteful spending programs.

Later, after it passed, CAGW identified some of these wasteful programs here, here and here to cite just a few examples.

Now that the Obama Administration is claiming that the huge spending bill “saved or created jobs,” we are finding that they are overstating the job-creating power of pork.  The White House website lists the total number of jobs that were saved or created as a rsult of an infusion of stimulus money, as reported by the recipients.  

The Associated Press researched the jobs claims and found they were overstated.  The AP’s blockbuster article began:

A Colorado company said it created 4,231 jobs with the help of President Barack Obama’s economic recovery plan. The real number: fewer than 1,000.

A child care center in Florida said it saved 129 jobs with the help of stimulus money. Instead, it gave pay raises to its existing employees.

Elsewhere in the U.S., some jobs credited to the stimulus program were counted two, three, four or even more times.

The government has overstated by thousands the number of jobs it has created or saved with federal contracts under the president’s $787 billion recovery program, according to an Associated Press review of data released in the program’s first progress report.

The Obama Administration immediately responded that it is just posting the information given to them by the recipients of the stimulus money.  Further, the White House said it knew the numbers were wrong and had caught some of the same overreporting. 

If that was the case, why didn’t the White House post the corrections?  The Obama Administration seems to be employing the “Catch Me If You Can” defense.  White House officials were attempting to suppress the bad information until after they could issue another press release claiming more jobs were created, despite the fact that unemployment rates continue to rise far above the level that President Obama predicted if only we would just pass his pork-filled stimulus bill.

According to the AP article:

[A] Colorado-based Teletech Government Solutions had worked with the Federal Communications Commission to come up with a job count for its $28.3 million contract for call centers fielding consumer questions about conversion of televisions to receive digital signals. The company reported creating 4,231 jobs—the highest number listed in the first stimulus accounting—even though 3,000 of those workers received a paycheck for five weeks or less.

Apparently the one-time conversion from analog to digital television signals was the type of job the Obama Administration wanted to “create” with the stimulus money.

The Toledo, Ohio-based Koring Group also received two FCC contracts to help people make the switch to digital television. The company reported hiring 26 people for each of the two contracts, bringing its total jobs to 54 on the government’s official count.

But the company cited the same 26 workers for both contracts, meaning the same jobs were counted twice. The job count was further inflated because each job lasted only about two months, so each worker should have counted as one-sixth of a full-time job.

So when the Obama Administration wants to trumpet all of the jobs they are creating, remember how they do their math.