re: #71 SixDegrees

The truly troubling bit is the alchemy involved in claiming jobs created or saved.

OMB Watch said its review yielded “really weird job numbers,” including many discrepancies within the reports themselves. For instance, Jennings said OMB Watch found that many companies said in a narrative portion of their reports that it was able to retain several employees because of stimulus funds, but the “jobs created” column read “zero.”

The Recovery Board aggregates its jobs data from the “jobs created” column to display the total number of jobs saved or created. Jennings speculated that recipients might have been confused about the scope of the term “created.”

“I would not stake any sort of claims on those job numbers,” said Jennings. “We don’t know what’s going on there.”

Even the job figures that are input correctly do not always reflect the true number of positions created by stimulus funds.

Prior to this Administration, no one ever considered a nonsensical statistic such as jobs saved, and yet Obama not only wants to use it to puff up his role in propping up the economy (which is a dubious assertion), but wants to lump the figure in with the jobs created - a more concrete term that requires the actual creation of a job.

In other words, if you still have your job after the recession, the Administration will consider it a saved job, even if the stimulus had nothing to do with it.