More Stimulus Accounting Shenanigans
Any person with a room temperature IQ can figure out that the Obama "jobs saved" metric is complete BS, a measure that is totally unmeasurable, and therefore can be set to any value the Administration wishes.
But this is, if anything, even crazier:
How much are politicians straining to convince people that the government is stimulating the economy? In Oregon, where lawmakers are spending $176 million to supplement the federal stimulus, Democrats are taking credit for a remarkable feat: creating 3,236 new jobs in the program's first three months.
But those jobs lasted on average only 35 hours, or about one work week. After that, those workers were effectively back unemployed, according to an Associated Press analysis of state spending and hiring data. By the state's accounting, a job is a job, whether it lasts three hours, three days, three months, or a lifetime.
"Sometimes some work for an individual is better than no work," said Oregon's Senate president, Peter Courtney.
With the economy in tatters and unemployment rising, Oregon's inventive math underscores the urgency for politicians across the country to show that spending programs designed to stimulate the economy are working "” even if that means stretching the facts.
At the federal level, President Barack Obama has said the federal stimulus has created 150,000 jobs, a number based on a misused formula and which is so murky it can't be verified.
On a full-time FTE basis, the report figures Oregon has "created" 215 full-time jobs. They don't even attempt to do the math on how many jobs were destroyed when $176 million was taken from other productive uses. But does anyone else syspect that the private hands the $176 million was formerly in probably would employ more than 215 people for that chunk of change?
