Thursday, October 29, 2009

AP Calls BS on "Stimulus"

Well, it looks as if the "most transparent government in history" is lying to us, again. Had a hard time finding the AP article - it used to be that stories critical of the government would be in bold-face on the Yahoo! home page; anyone have any ideas why that doesn't happen anymore?

Anyway - all the job totals the Obama administration has been touting so far as proof that the stimulus "works" are...extremely suspect, tot say the least. Here's the AP investigative report:

The government's first accounting of jobs tied to the $787 billion stimulus program claimed more than 30,000 positions paid for with recovery money. But that figure is overstated by least 5,000 jobs, according to an Associated Press review of a sample of stimulus contracts.

The AP review found some counts were more than 10 times as high as the actual number of jobs; some jobs credited to the stimulus program were counted two and sometimes more than four times; and other jobs were credited to stimulus spending when none was produced.

For example:
- A company working with the Federal Communications Commission reported that stimulus money paid for 4,231 jobs, when about 1,000 were produced.
- A Georgia community college reported creating 280 jobs with recovery money, but none was created from stimulus spending.
- A Florida child care center said its stimulus money saved 129 jobs but used the money on raises for existing employees.


As of early Thursday, on its recovery.org Web site, the government was still citing 30,383 as the actual number of jobs linked so far to stimulus spending, despite the mistakes the White House has now acknowledged

It's not clear just how far off the 30,000 claim was.....
I'll bet by 50%, when all is said and done. And when you check the jobs that were created or "saved", at least temporarily, you'll find a huge percentage of them belong to either a favored Democratic constituency or a favored Democratic industry.

But I am sure we will see none of these problems once we give the Democrats control of the health care industry...

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