The White House Juices the Stimulus Jobs Creation Count

[Better Believe It]

White House Juices the Job Count
January 11, 2010

The White House will now count all jobs funded by stimulus money, not just those that were created or saved. The job market is still hemorrhaging and the administration might be looking to do a little inflation. Or it might honestly be trying to simplify a confusing and highly criticized formula for counting jobs.

http://www.truthdig.com/eartotheground/item/white_house_juices_the_job_count_20100111/?ln#below


----------------------------------




White House Changes Stimulus Jobs Count
by Michael Grabell
January 11, 2010

When the White House unveiled its nearly $800 billion stimulus package last year, it promised not only to create and save 3.5 million jobs but also to open the books and prove it. But counting jobs turned out to be a lot harder than lining up a work crew and tapping hardhats.

Now, the White House says it will no longer keep a cumulative tally of jobs created and saved by the stimulus. Instead, it will post only a count of jobs for each quarter.

And instead of counting only created and saved jobs, it will count any person who works on a project funded with stimulus money—even if that person was never in danger of losing his or her job.

The new rules came out last month in a little-noticed memo <1> (PDF) sent to federal agencies by Peter Orszag, director of the Office of Management and Budget. OMB said it changed the guidelines to prevent the kinds of errors and confusion that occurred when the first job counts came out in October.

With tens of thousands of recipients now scrambling to meet the Jan. 15 deadline for the next report, the new guidance could significantly change what the public sees. Some examples:

When Chrysler reported a $53 million contract to build 3,000 government vehicles last fall, it listed zero jobs because it used existing employees to fill the orders. But under the new rules, those workers would have counted.
The Associated Press found that some recipients were counting pay raises as stimulus jobs. That will be OK under the new rules, but only if they are counted as fractions of a job.
The California state auditor rapped the state corrections department for reporting 18,000 jobs instead of just 5,000 officers who had received layoff notices before stimulus money came in. But under the new guidance, the corrections department may have been right because stimulus money is helping it make payroll for all its employees.

Read the full article at:

http://www.propublica.org/ion/stimulus/item/white-house-changes-stimulus-jobs-count-111

[shopgreen]

1. Sweet juice for the public. No change here.

[leftstreet]

2. K&R