Thread: “jobs created or saved” out, jobs "funded with Recovery Act dollars" in

so we have a semantical shift to set us straight and create a more meaningfiul metric...

catchy eh?FGS.....:rolleyes:


The memo, first noted by ProPublica, says that those receiving stimulus funds no longer have to say whether a job has been saved or created.
“Instead, recipients will more easily and objectively report on jobs funded with Recovery Act dollars,” Orszag wrote.


In other words, if the project is being funded with stimulus dollars – even if the person worked at that company or organization before and will work the same place afterwards – that’s a stimulus job…

Rep. Darrell Issa of California, the top Republican on the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, wrote to the chair of the Recovery Act Transparency and Accountability Board Earl Devaney saying that “the new guidance counts every jobs that is funded using stimulus money – even if it existed before the Recovery Act, and was not in any danger of being eliminated – as ‘created or saved.’ This definition ignores the plain meanings of the words ‘created’ and ‘saved’ and makes Recovery.gov’s ‘JOBS CREATED/SAVED’ label a falsehood, further eroding the confidence of the American people in their government.”

Farewell ?Saved or Created?: Obama Administration Changes the Counting of Stimulus Jobs* - Political Punch

Originally Posted by goober

Really, the AP came out and admitted that?
No link?

Do live under a rock? Or, the equivalent, get your news only from liberal blogs?

Massive New Study Confirms Stimulus Spending On Road Construction Does Nothing To Lower Unemployment

Spending government money on road construction does nothing to lower local unemployment, a massive new study of 700 counties by the AP shows.

There is no difference in unemployment trends between counties that received the most stimulus money and the group that received none.

U.S. stimulus road projects did not help unemployment, report shows | New Jersey Business - - NJ.com

Ten months into President Barack Obama's first economic stimulus plan, a surge in spending on U.S. roads and bridges has had no effect on local unemployment and only barely helped the beleaguered construction industry, according to an Associated Press analysis of stimulus projects every state, including New Jersey.

Spend a lot or spend nothing at all, it did not matter, the AP analysis showed: Local unemployment rates rose and fell regardless of how much stimulus money Washington poured out for transportation, raising questions about Obama's argument that more road money would address an "urgent need to accelerate job growth."

Of course, Barack Obama has a better authority than the AP among his top advisors. If Obama was actually interested in listening to what the scientists who work for him already know, instead of blindly pursuing a left-wing statist agenda, then we wouldn't have had this boondoggle in the first place:

Greg Mankiw's Blog: Spending and Tax Multipliers

In their new blog, Bob Hall and Susan Woodward look at spending increases from World War II and the Korean War and conclude that the government spending multiplier is about one: A dollar of government spending raises GDP by about a dollar. ... [In contrast] recent research by Christina Romer and David Romer looks at tax changes and concludes that the tax multiplier is about three: A dollar of tax cuts raises GDP by about three dollars.

Christina Romer is the head of Barack Obama's council of economic advisors.

Listen to your experts, Barack.

On a related note, an economy cannot grow when the government is constantly changing the rules of the game.

Again today, we have the Administration making things up as they go along, floating the idea of retroactively imposing a prepayment penalty on banks that paid back TARP funds early. Six months ago, the TARP inspector general was bragging that he was doing everything in his power to force banks to pay back the money quickly. They did. Now the administration wants to penalize them for doing what the administration told them to do. This is not the way government and business interact in America; this is the way government and business interact in corruption riddled third world dictatorships.