Wednesday, the Washington Post reported: “For months, economists and government watchdogs have warned that the job-creation reports should be taken with a heavy grain of salt. . . . Trying to count the number of jobs created or saved may have been a fool’s errand that needlessly undermined the credibility of the overall reporting effort.”
No kidding. Now, the AP reports that the White House
has abandoned its controversial method of counting jobs under President Barack Obama’s economic stimulus, making it impossible to track the number of jobs saved or created with the $787 billion in recovery money. Despite mounting a vigorous defense of its earlier count of more than 640,000 jobs credited to the stimulus, even after numerous errors were identified, the Obama administration now is making it easier to give the stimulus credit for hiring. It’s no longer about counting a job as saved or created; now it’s a matter of counting jobs funded by the stimulus.
I see. So like in Communist Russia, from now on, in America, economic growth and efficiency or wealth creation won’t be the goal of public policies. It’s all about hiring someone to dig a hole and hiring another one to fill it up and counting it as two jobs.
The administration must be aware of how bad this would look since the “new rules” were “quietly published last month in a memorandum to federal agencies. . . . The new rules are intended to streamline the process, said Tom Gavin, spokesman for the White House’s Office of Management and Budget.”
Way to go team Obama!
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