'Saved Or Created' Nonsense

*sigh*

The White House is lying about the economy again:

The White House put out its new fuzzy porkulus math report — and then patted itself on the back for "transparency:"

More than 650,000 jobs have been saved or created under President Barack Obama's economic stimulus plan, the White House said Friday, saying it is on track to reach the president's goal of 3.5 million jobs by the end of next year.

New job numbers from businesses, contractors, state and local governments, nonprofit groups and universities were not scheduled to be released publicly until Friday afternoon. But White House economic adviser Jared Bernstein says officials have been told the figures. When adding in jobs linked to $288 billion in tax cuts, Bernstein says the stimulus plan has created or saved more than 1 million jobs.

The data will be posted on recovery.gov, the web site of the independent panel overseeing stimulus spending.

"It's a great example of the unprecedented transparency, where the American taxpayer can point and click and see their taxes creating jobs," Bernstein said.

This particular lie is so egregiously outrageous that not even the Associated Press could swallow it.  In fact, here's how they had reported the initial claim of 30,000 jobs just yesterday:

An early progress report on President Barack Obama's economic recovery plan overstates by thousands the number of jobs created or saved through the stimulus program, a mistake that White House officials promise will be corrected in future reports.

The government's first accounting of jobs tied to the $787 billion stimulus program claimed more than 30,000 positions paid for with recovery money. But that figure is overstated by least 5,000 jobs, according to an Associated Press review of a sample of stimulus contracts.

The AP review found some counts were more than 10 times as high as the actual number of jobs; some jobs credited to the stimulus program were counted two and sometimes more than four times; and other jobs were credited to stimulus spending when none was produced.

...

There's no evidence the White House sought to inflate job numbers in the report. But administration officials seized on the 30,000 figure as evidence that the stimulus program was on its way toward fulfilling the president's promise of creating or saving 3.5 million jobs by the end of next year.

The reporting problem could be magnified Friday when a much larger round of reports is expected to show hundreds of thousands of jobs repairing public housing, building schools, repaving highways and keeping teachers on local payrolls.

Yep, I'd say we got that magnification, wouldn't you?

Ace of Spades offers this analysis and example:

When the WH demanded that those who received Spendulus money "report" back on how many jobs were "saved or created," they insisted upon a nonsensical rule: If a single dollar of Spendulus was spent on an employee's salary, whether that employee was a new employee or an old one, that gets counted as a job "saved or created." If he's a new employee, that job was created. If he's an existing employee, that job was saved.

For $1.

Yes, $1. Because the nonsensical rules the White House told these people to count "saved or created" jobs by simply stated: If any employee's salary is paid, in whole or in part (any part!), count that as a job "saved or created" by the spending.

And then report that number back to us.

Note that the White House's rules do not seek to discover which jobs really were "saved or created." To come to that conclusion, one would need a set of more rigorous rules -- which excluded some jobs from the "saved or created" category, rather than attempting to include them all under that rubric.

For example, you'd need a rule like: "If the funding pays more than 10% of an employee's salary, and the management feels the employee would not have been hired, or would have been fired, but for that spending, then this job should be counted as 'saved or created. "

They didn't do that. They didn't set a 10% threshold, or even a 1% threshold. A single dollar counts as saving or creating a job.

Further, they never asked if the employee would be out of a job but for that spending.

Because they didn't want to actually find out which jobs were saved or created. They just wanted as large a number as possible, even if it made no sense, and had nothing at all to do with jobs really affected by the spending.

So, if a factory gets $5000, and divides that, $50 a worker, among 100 workers, you know how many jobs were "saved or created" according to Obama?

100. Even though $5000 obviously doesn't cover a single part-time salary, let alone 100 full-time salaries.

If a factory gets $5000, and divides that, $1 a worker, among 5000 workers, Obama's rules say 5000 jobs were saved or created.

And note that in neither case does the employee have to be a new one. It could be a guy working there for 30 years, whom the company would never even consider firing. Per the rules, if he gets 50 bucks, or even a single dollar, his job was right there "saved" by Bonny Prince Barack.

Hot Air adds the icing on the cake:

The "majority of funds" came from state governments because Porkulus distributed the money in block grants to the states.  What did the states do with that money?  They did save jobs, but primarily bureaucratic jobs.  States used the money to temporarily paper over budget gaps which would have forced the layoffs of state employees, which should have been a necessary step in slimming down state-level spending.

The administration will claim that it saved the jobs of teachers, police officers, and firefighters with the data submitted by the states.  Indeed, we have already seen this in New Hampshire, which listed almost all of its "saved or created" jobs from their education system. ...

No one was going to have a mass layoff of police officers and teachers in New Hampshire or anywhere else.  The jobs really at risk were administrative jobs within state government, primarily union jobs (in large part represented by Obama's ally, the SEIU), as states had to confront an economic reality of lower revenue and rising spending.   Porkulus provided a one-time method of ignoring that reality for a few months by burdening the entire nation with the bad policy decisions of the individual states.

But all that did was to delay that day of reckoning, not eliminate it.  When the grant money runs out, those states will still have to make tough decisions on the size and costs of their bureaucracies.  They will still have to either raise taxes or start trimming their payrolls, and it won't be the teacher or the firefighter who gets the pink slip.  Porkulus will do the same thing that Cash for Clunkers did, which was to postpone the inevitable — and cost us a fortune in doing so.

You know, at least Bill Clinton could lie well enough to be believed.  This latest round of lies from Barack Obama is so utterly, incompetently performed that not even the official transcribers and genuflecting lapdogs in the mainstream media will accept it.

Yes, it's that obvious.

There's my two cents.