Barack Obama's Stupid JOBS-SAVED Tricks

When President Obama started backpedaling on the number of Jobs his economic stimulus would create he started using the bogus term "Saved or created." This is how William McGurn described the term for the Wall Street Journal:

"To begin with, the number is pure fiction -- the administration has no way to measure how many jobs are actually being 'saved.' And if we had tried to use something this flimsy, the press would never have let us get away with it."
“How do you know what a saved job is? How do you know what jobs would have been lost without this?” Davis said. “That was a clever political gimmick to make it even harder to determine whether this policy has any effect.”

Today the AP released a report that moved Job Saved from the ridiculous to the really comical. For example the Georgia Community Action Council which claims that 935 jobs were saved, impressive if true, but it can't be true because only 508 people work there.

The Georgia nonprofit's inflated job count is among persisting errors in the government's latest effort to measure the effect of the $787 billion stimulus plan despite White House promises last week that the new data would undergo an "extensive review" to root out errors discovered in an earlier report.

According to the White House if you got a raise, you count as a saved job.

About two-thirds of the 14,506 jobs claimed to be saved under one federal office, the Administration for Children and Families at Health and Human Services, actually weren't saved at all, according to a review of the latest data by The Associated Press. Instead, that figure includes more than 9,300 existing employees in hundreds of local agencies who received pay raises and benefits and whose jobs weren't saved.

On his birthday I raised my son's allowance by a dollar/week I wonder if the POTUS is counting him as a saved job also. Mr. President it doesn't matter what my kid does, I am not going to fire him for taking out the trash.

....officials defended the practice of counting raises as saved jobs. "If I give you a raise, it is going to save a portion of your job," HHS spokesman Luis Rosero said.

..The raises themselves were appropriate – the stimulus law set aside money for Head Start salary increases – but converting that number into jobs proved difficult. The Obama administration told Head Start officials to consider a fraction of each employee as a job saved.

"That's more than ridiculous," said Antonia Ferrier, a spokeswoman for Republican House Minority Leader John Boehner.

Many Head Start programs around the country went further, counting everyone who received a raise as a job saved.

"It's a glitch in the system," said Ben Allen, the research director at the National Head Start Association. "There was some misunderstanding among some in the Head Start community about completing the reporting requirements."

Allen said a cost-of-living adjustment "may not be viewed traditionally as a job saved, but one could interpret it that, by providing COLA, you're retaining staff."

The Bergen County Community Action Program in Hackensack, N.J., noted the nearly $213,000 it received went to cover raises for existing staff only, but it also reported saving 85 jobs.

At Southwest Georgia Community Action Council in Moultrie, Ga., director Myrtis Mulkey-Ndawula said she followed the guidelines the Obama administration provided. She said she multiplied the 508 employees by 1.84 – the percentage pay raise they received – and came up with 935 jobs saved.

"I would say it's confusing at best," she said. "But we followed the instructions we were given."

Ed DeSeve, who oversees the stimulus at the White House, said the Head Start numbers "represent a few percent of all jobs reported" and said the problems would probably be balanced out by other errors that underreported jobs.

"So we don't expect any corrections to this data to meaningfully impact the total 640,000 direct jobs," DeSeve said.

More than 250 other community agencies in the U.S. similarly reported saving jobs when using the money to give pay raises, to pay for training and continuing education, to extend employee work hours or to buy equipment, according to their spending reports.

The real issue here is trust. As a manager I would tell my staff that bad news never makes me angry...Holding back bad news always makes me angry.  This hoax called Jobs saved used by our president is simply an excuse to hold back bad news from the public.  It makes me wonder what else is he hiding from us.

Read more at: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/11/04/white-house-stimulus-repo_n_345217.html