President Obama's "Jobs Saved or Created" Claim Meets Shocking Reality

Conservatives have been wary of “stimulus job creation” claims for quite some time and now it turns out that the rat you’ve been smelling just went for the cheese. The fun is found in trying to understand how to calculate a “job saved” when any job that is not lost qualifies for the category. It’s like trying to play chess with yourself. By my calculations, by Dec 31, 10.2 percent unemployment will mean that 89.8 percent of those eligible for employment will still have jobs; with a civilian labor force participation rate at 65.1 percent of a population around 350 million (according to the Bureau of Labor and Statistics), Congress will have saved nearly 228 million jobs by the time we sing Auld Lang Syne! Considering the infancy of the “jobs saved” category, it’s reasonable to assume that President Barack Obama has saved more American jobs than any President in recorded history (at least since Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner started pawning off statistics studies as economics studies and left F.A. Hayek alone with his Pulitzer). So, have yourself a Merry Little Christmas! What are you tea party goers upset about? We need to start focusing on more important questions like what percentage of the “jobs saved or created” are jobs “saved” and what percentage are jobs “created” and whether a job created is still considered a job if no one has filled the position yet?

This job creation would all be glorious news (wink wink) if so many of the jobs saved or created were not under suspicion now by newspapers around the country (including Georgia’s own Atlanta Journal Constitution). Fortunately for the hucksters, no one reads newspapers these days. Curses if they actually read this online column! According to The Washington Examiner and a list of 11 papers, more than 10% of the jobs claimed in the “created or saved” category are now considered “doubtful or imaginary” results from the $787 billion dollar spending bill. The White House says the plan has successfully created 650,000 new jobs. Of course, it pitched the stimulus claiming that unemployment would level off at 8 percent and that was over 2 percentage points ago (but it was also delivered with phenomenal cadence, sentence structure and rhetorical ability and that has to count for something)!

Here in the Peach State (a.k.a, God’s Country - $10 dollars says we all get to Heaven and the Almighty smells like Cutter Bug Spray) we created a plethora of new jobs. Community Action for Improvement, A Head Start organization, redefined, er, reported job creation with 77 newbies based on salary raises it gave to existing employees. The group also worked its numerical magic with 317 salary increases counted as jobs created for Head Start workers in the Augusta area. Another Augusta agency claimed 68 jobs created before the work became available. East Central Technical College even discovered a way to award gainful employment status to students enrolled in programs they are partially funding with stimulus cash. To their credit (I think), their most recent claim suggests they did not know that stimulus money for job creation was not to be used for something other than job creation.

Still unconvinced? Browse over to the Federal government’s own Recovery.org website, designed to show us how proficient our government is at accounting (if not accounting, at least they are whiz kids with Flash software) and you will find that Georgia has received over $1 billion in total stimulus including over $1.5 million in Georgia’s 86th Congressional district, $850,000 in the 25th Congressional, $725,000 in the 21st, $422,000 in the 19th Congressional and nearly $257,000 in the 14th Congressional not to mention the money we have received in Congressional districts that actually exist! Amorphously re-districted election maps are one thing. If it’s really true that Georgia has more than 13 Congressional districts, this is great news and I demand my other 73 representatives! (I’m still looking for the unaccounted for population boom but this kind of Congressional muscle will make us the seat of power for the whole nation - California, eat your heart out.) The disadvantage is none of these districts have created any jobs with the money they are hoarding. The up side is we have a rainy day fund for when the drought kicks back in and we need to buy a tri state solution. Georgia is in line for $4.2 billion dollars in promised stimulus booty so we have even more on the way. The only nagging question is why the Gwinnett County Board of Education is suing the State Board for money allocated to charter schools like Ivy Prep Academy when they register as one of the top 5 recipients state wide with over $104 million in their stimulus kitty.

The lessons learned from “job saver-creation” math are simple: when determining whether a job counts as a job created or a job saved, first calculate the average income in the district in which the job resides (or one day will reside), relative to that job category and the given skill level of the worker, then multiply that by a factor of 5 percent (or whatever percentage is conducive with average cost of living increases given the area in question) and determine the difference between the existing salary of the worker and the salary increase needed to save that job from extinction given rising inflation in the given area. If the discrepancy is greater, then congratulations, raising that salary saved a job. If the discrepancy is less, still give the worker his raise, multiply his “excess income” by the number of workers receiving a raise and shoe horn a group of average income salaries into the total to get the figure for the number of jobs you just created on paper. If none of this works, simply blame George W. Bush and hire a behavioral economist to tell us all that we just think we’re losing our jobs. In reality, we’re simply gaining valuable time to relax and think about what it will feel like to speak Chinese.