Caroline Baum over at Bloomberg is really pissed off about the jobs saved or created "imbroglio". This is worth quoting at length.
Flawed Metrics
How well do government stimulus programs work? Outside of some econometric model prediction, we don’t know. It’s impossible to run a real-world control experiment.
We do know that on Feb. 13, 2009, Congress passed the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act. While the Obama administration insists it was not a jobs bill, the first goal, according to the Recovery.gov Web site, was to “create new jobs as well as save existing ones.”
Thus began the “jobs created or saved” imbroglio, an attempt to quantify something unquantifiable. On Oct. 30, the Obama administration reported that 640,329 jobs had been created or saved from Feb. 17 to Sept. 30. (The Web site has since added 20 jobs to that total.) Watchdog groups smelled a rat, sifted through the data and found jobs that weren’t created in districts that didn’t exist.
Let's see, that's 640,329 jobs created or saved between February 17 and September 30, 2009. Subsequently, 20 more jobs were added for that period.
640,329 + 20 = 640,349, ± 0
Not approximately 640,349 jobs saved or created. Not 640,348. Not 640,350. No, it is exactly 640,349. Caroline continues—
Shamed by revelations of bureaucratic ineptitude, the government redefined its metric. Going forward, it would tally all jobs funded by ARRA, even if they already existed.
Pay Without Performance
On Jan. 30, Recovery.gov posted a second report claiming 599,108 jobs were funded in the fourth quarter of last year. While the numbers from the two reporting periods aren’t comparable, the measures are so flawed and the job count so far fetched as to render them close enough for government work, and our purposes as well.
Whoa, Nelly! What flaws could Caroline be referring to? Double counting? Nonsense! Far fetched? We think not. Here at Decline of the Empire, we are grateful that these Obama people are so precise. We need to recalculate—
640,349 + 599,108 = 1,239,457, ± 0
Caroline is still upset—
Between Feb. 17 and Dec. 31, the government doled out $57,864,901,449 in federal contract, grant and loan awards yielding 1,239,457 jobs (no inexact rounding for this administration!). That computes to $46,686 per job created, saved, funded or fabricated.
Why not simply write a check in that amount to each new job holder? It would be a lot easier and cheaper than funding a bureaucracy to orchestrate the effort.
OK, I hear you. A job is more than the money it yields. It gives us a sense of purpose, improves our self-esteem and provides a reason to get up in the morning.
The point is, government can always put people to work. It can hire teams of men with shovels to labor for weeks doing the work one earth-moving machine and operator can accomplish in one day.
A sense of purpose. Yes, that's what its all about.
They certainly have a sense of purpose in the Obama Administration. Unfortunately, that purpose is to bamboozle anyone gullible enough to believe them. Still, you've got to admire the sheer audacity of their work, its great quality in expressing quantity. Exactly 1,239, 457 jobs have been saved or created since February 17, 2009. So precise!
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