It seems that the brush with death on Morrissey Boulevard has sharpened the objectivity of the Globe, which is still owned by the New York Times, at least enough to add Massachusetts to the states discovering that the Obama administration's claims of jobs "saved or created" are fraudulent:That 'brush with death' Hot Air mentions is referring to the almost-bankruptcy and closure that threatened the paper not long ago. I think an appropriate phrase to use here is that old saw about how a conservative is simply a liberal who's been mugged by reality - it appears that at least a portion of the Globe recognized their own personal mugging, and are now suddenly a little more realistic on the unemployment of others. Some examples they cite:While Massachusetts recipients of federal stimulus money collectively report 12,374 jobs saved or created, a Globe review shows that number is wildly exaggerated. Organizations that received stimulus money miscounted jobs, filed erroneous figures, or claimed jobs for work that has not yet started.
That lead has appeared in almost that exact form in every newspaper that has bothered to check on Obama's numbers.
Hot Air supplies the overall math:One of the largest reported jobs figures comes from Bridgewater State College, which is listed as using $77,181 in stimulus money for 160 full-time work-study jobs for students. But Bridgewater State spokesman Bryan Baldwin said the college made a mistake and the actual number of new jobs was "almost nothing.'' Bridgewater has submitted a correction, but it is not yet reflected in the report.
In other cases, federal money that recipients already receive annually – subsidies for affordable housing, for example – was reclassified this year as stimulus spending, and the existing jobs already supported by those programs were credited to stimulus spending. Some of these recipients said they did not even know the money they were getting was classified as stimulus funds until September, when federal officials told them they had to file reports.
"There were no jobs created. It was just shuffling around of the funds,'' said Susan Kelly, director of property management for Boston Land Co., which reported retaining 26 jobs with $2.7 million in rental subsidies for its affordable housing developments in Waltham. "It's hard to figure out if you did the paperwork right. We never asked for this.''
Massachusetts has already received $4 billion in stimulus funds. Even accepting the initial Obama claim, that comes to over $323,000 per job saved or created. At that rate, the remaining $1 billion would create less that 4500 new jobs. That hardly seems like a cost-effective way to create new jobs. The only jobs it "saved", to the extent it did it at all, were those of bureaucrats. The Globe reports later in the article that the money went to cover state budget gaps, as we have seen in nearly every application, and not towards any economic stimulus.
They also point out the increasingly long list of states that have confirmed and reported on the fraud and failure of Obama's stimulus:
Of course, that hasn't stopped Obama from continuing to claim that jobs are being created. Today's number is 1 million. Given that the economy is the #1 issue on most voters' minds, and given the fact that Obama's claim is demonstrably false, it is therefore easy to understand why his approval ratings on the economy are plummeting even faster than on health care.
There's my two cents.
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