Thread: Stimulus jobs overstated in report

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20091029/..._stimulus_jobs

WASHINGTON – The White House is promising that new figures being released Friday will be a more accurate showing of progress in President Barack Obama's economic recovery plan. It aggressively defended an earlier, faulty count that overstated by thousands the jobs created or saved so far.

Ed DeSeve, serving as Obama's stimulus overseer, said the administration has been working for weeks to correct mistakes in early counts that identified more than 30,000 jobs paid for with stimulus money. He said a new stimulus report Friday should correct many mistakes an Associated Press review found that showed the earlier report overstated thousands of stimulus jobs.

"I think you'll see a pretty good degree of accuracy," DeSeve said in an interview.

White House spokesman Robert Gibbs downplayed errors in job counts identified by the AP's review, telling reporters, "We're talking about 4,000, or a 5,000 error."

The AP reviewed a sample of federal contracts, not all 9,000 reported to date, and discovered errors in one in six jobs credited to the $787 billion stimulus program — or 5,000 of the 30,000 jobs claimed so far.

Even in its limited review, the AP found job counts that were more than 10 times as high as the actual number of paid positions; jobs credited to the stimulus program that were counted two and sometimes more than four times; and other jobs that were credited to stimulus spending when none was produced.

For example:

• Some recipients of stimulus money used the cash to give existing employees pay raises, but each reported saving dozens of jobs with the money, including one Florida day care that claimed 129 jobs saved.

• A Texas contractor whose business kept 22 employees to handle stimulus contracts saw its job count inflated to 88 because the same workers were counted four times.

• The water department in Palm Beach County, Fla., hired 57 meter readers, customer service representatives and other positions to handle two water projects. But their total job count was incorrectly doubled to 114.

Those errors were included in an early progress report on the stimulus released two weeks ago that featured numerous mistakes, including a Colorado business' claim that its stimulus contract created more than 4,200 jobs. TeleTech Government Solutions actually hired 4,231 temporary workers for its stimulus project, but most of them worked for five weeks or less and the others no more than five months, company president Mariano Tan said.

The short-term positions should have been reported as 635 full-time, 40-hour-a-week jobs under the government's method of calculating stimulus work, Tan said.

Some businesses actually undercounted jobs funded with stimulus money, the AP's review shows, because they reported only new jobs created, not existing jobs saved. But by far the most reporting errors were found in the number of jobs credited to the stimulus.

Gibbs said that early data couldn't be reviewed as carefully as new data will be. "Three days after the data was received, it was required to be put on the Web site," he said, referring to the government's recovery.gov site that serves as the official accounting of stimulus data.

The Colorado business' job count, along with many others, has been corrected, Gibbs said, and will be updated in Friday's report.

"We disputed, as the AP disputed, the report that came in that calculated a number of jobs but didn't accurately account, the way we account for, a full-time, yearlong employee as being a job," Gibbs said.

His comments during his daily meeting with reporters came hours after the White House issued a midnight press release complaining about the AP's review of jobs the government credits to stimulus spending.

DeSeve, who criticized the AP's review as misleading, said the administration is aware of problems with the early data. Agencies have been working with businesses that received the money to correct mistakes. Other errors discovered by the public also will be corrected, he said.

"As a result, whatever problems the early and partial data had, the full data to be posted on Friday will provide the American people with an accurate, detailed look at the early success of the Recovery Act," DeSeve said in a statement the White House issued just after midnight Thursday.

Originally Posted by jason_jinx

whats your point?

I just thought it was an interesting article I'd share with you guys .

But if it makes you feel better, go ahead and call me a whackjob now, and get it overwith

I do believe the levels of unemployment speak for themselves.

Although the stock market is looking pretty good today.

The stock market is Not a good indicator of how the economy is "doing" as a whole. Most of the market going up is due to banks investing to get the money to pay the govt back and Not Consumer driven. So its really a False rally because the average investor( like myself) is NOt Investing Anything in the market. The Comercial real estate market hitting the wall is the Next shoe to drop that will make the Residential real estate crash look like a drop in the bucket. Oh and for the nay sayers......... just wait you will see. Just look in your own local neighborhoods and see how many businesses are now out of business and how many shops have For Rent/ lease signs in front of them. There are Tons of commercial space available in the Orlando area.

Originally Posted by jason_jinx

Originally Posted by rock_lobster

Originally Posted by jason_jinx

whats your point?

I just thought it was an interesting article I'd share with you guys .

But if it makes you feel better, go ahead and call me a whackjob now, and get it overwith

lol
Nah you just convinced everyone to change their evil ways and go conservative republican.

One can only dream

Originally Posted by Red_Lizard2

Businesses are going out of business because consumer confidence is low, likely due to the high unemployment rates. Still though it would be even lower if the banks had actually failed etc.

Or basically people are saving instead of spending.

You think so? I think in the long run it would have been cheaper to let some of them go under. Or at the very least, just buy the debt straight up as opposed to lending it to them. (if that makes any sense).

The market coming back is no surprise, but I'm not giving the award for it to the Porkulus anytime soon. The market would have bounced back anyways, and I don't feel the progress it has made is worth the money we are spending for it.

Where is our TARP money ?
Wasn't that 800 billion dollars supposed to stop the recession ?