The Obama administration is creating material for comedy with its absurd “jobs created or saved” claims. Our Vice President Joe Biden is always good for a laugh and should be featured more prominently on the recovery.gov website where the administration’s propaganda is posted. It is funnier if we can look at it as a comedy site.
The numbers keep changing by the credibility of the claims is consistently zero: nearly 650,000 unverifiable jobs have been created or saved:
So while the administration was way off on its 30,000 jobs claim, it is now expecting the American public to believe that its 650,000 jobs claim is accurate. And VP Joe Biden takes it even farther in claiming that in reality over 1 million jobs have been created. Perhaps Biden subscribes to the old theory that the bigger the lie the more likely people are to believe it. Already though, several errors have been found in the administration’s new numbers which are basically the same types of errors in the initial 30,000 jobs claim.
Beyond the errors, as it did with the Cash for Clunkers program, the administration is not taking into account jobs that would have been saved or created even without the stimulus package. But simply using the administration’s figures shows just how costly and efficient the stimulus has. To date, $215 billion of the stimulus monies have been spent. That means it has cost approximately $336,000 to create or save each of those 640,000 jobs. Given that most of the jobs have been in education, that seems kind of high since most teachers and administrators do not make anything close to $336,000 per year.
Even if the administration meets its goal of creating or saving 3.5 million jobs by the end of next year, those jobs will come at a cost of approximately $225,000 each. According to Biden though, the stimulus is “operating as advertised,” so inefficiency was apparently a part of the plan all along.
Hugh Hewitt summarizes the ridiculous nature of the claims and the lost opportunity here:
Jobs “created or saved” is already recognized as a laugh line in an era of 10% unemployment, and the politically toxic combination of amusement and bitterness at the spin deepens every time the president or one of his representatives uses it.
The truth is that nearly a trillion dollars that could have been used to generate jobs via robust tax cuts was instead largely wasted. The president could have done many many things with a trillion dollars. What he chose to do was pass out political payoffs. The only lasting thing he has created with the stimulus is scorn for the phrase “created or saved.”
