Stimulus Has Added 150,000 Jobs…Or Has It?
Monday, May 04, 2009
Last Wednesday President Barack Obama declared that the $787 billion economic stimulus bill has already created or saved more than 150,000 jobs. The truth is, however, the White House has no definitive numbers showing this declaration to be accurate. Instead, administration economists took the original projection that the stimulus bill, adopted in February, would save or create three to four million jobs and they prorated things up to April 21. So if everything is going according to plan, the country should have 150,000 jobs it wouldn’t have had if Congress didn’t adopt the stimulus plan.
The only solid job numbers the federal government can provide come from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, and those numbers aren’t so good. In March the nation lost another 663,000 jobs. When asked about the contrast between the Bureau of Labor Statistics numbers and what President Obama claimed, Thomas Gavin of the White House budget office explained to ProPublica, “It doesn’t mean that employment has risen by 150,000. Rather, it means that employment is 150,000 jobs better than it otherwise would have been.”
-Noel Brinkerhoff
Fact-Checking Obama on That Job Count (by Mosi Secret, ProPublica)
Hey Rocky, Watch Me Pull a Number Out of My Hat! (by King Banaian, SCSU Scholars)
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