The Swine Line

The reports of phony numbers of jobs that were “saved or created” by President Obama’s bloated pork-laden stimulus bill keep pouring in.  Yet curiously, the White House refuses to make the corrections and continues to tout the phony numbers of over 640,000 jobs.

Last week, we pointed out that the Obama Administration had a problem with counting here and here.

Now today, the Department of Labor confirms the stimulus bill really isn’t working as the economy continues to shed jobs at record levels pushing the unemployment rate up to 10.2%.  This is a far cry higher than what President Obama promised.  Remember that this administration said if Congress passes his stimulus bill, it will prevent unemployment from reaching 8%.

USA Today uncovered another example of the outrageously inaccurate counting of jobs done by the Obama Administration.  They found one stimulus grant that was spent in a small town in Texas for roofing repair and a fence.  However, this $26,000 grant somehow is credited with creating 450 jobs in a town that has only 900 people! 

The reporters inquired about this miracle of job creation with Mr. Bob Bray who received the grant.

“Oh, no,” said Bray, who runs the local public housing authority part-time with his wife, Linda, when asked about the discrepancy. He said that he told the government that he had created six jobs but that a federal official told him that wasn’t right. So he reported the number of hours the roofers worked instead. The Department of Housing and Urban Development caught the mistake, but he couldn’t fix it before the jobs figures were published. “The money was great, but the reports are really confusing,” he said. “I’ve been fighting with it for over a month and a half.”

The White House has been questioned about this problem.

Obama’s senior adviser for the stimulus, Ed DeSeve, said last week that officials had “scrubbed” those reports for three weeks before they were released Friday, though he said some would still have errors.

If the numbers have been “scrubbed” for three weeks and Mr. Bray has been attempting to get it corrected for a month and a half, why has no change been made?

Liz Oxhorn, a spokeswoman for the White House stimulus effort, said the reports give “the American people one of the best looks ever at real-time information about a major initiative” and the reporting “allows people to find any mistakes, as it should — which will help us correct them promptly.”

Maybe the White House has the same problem with understanding the meaning of the word “promptly” like they do with understanding how to actually create jobs.