Assuming there is a factual answer but then again, this may very will turn into a GD and get moved.
Ever since the errors on the government website that tracks job creations were discovered (like congressional districts and zip codes that don’t exist), I’ve noticed Obama backing away from specific numbers and instead referring to millions and millions.
Is there an official nubmer of jobs created/saved from the stimulus money?
Is there a criteria to designate a job as saved? For example, GM got a ton of money. Is now every GM job considered saved?
Due to the errors in the report and the President now using soft numbers, does the government even know how many jobs were created or saved by the stimulus money?
The obvious answer is that nobody can produce an exact, precise number because you can’t test against a hypothetical world in which the stimulus didn’t exist.
One area where you could get a somewhat precise figure would be in state government jobs (teachers, etc.) that were due to be terminated but were not when the federal stimulus money came in. My sister-in-law is this category.
As far as claims, the White House claimed 640,000 jobs, as I’m sure you know. It has since pulled back some of those (maybe 10%) due to what it considers unlikely claims by reporting agencies.
Also, as I’m sure you know, more than a third of the stimulus was a tax cut, not government spending. Only 27% was direct spending aimed at saving or creating jobs.
Our reporting was due 1/15/10, but there was an extension granted across the board until 1/22/10 (but late reports would be marked “late”). I’d imagine numbers for the last quarter will be available soon.
PolitiFact analysed Obama’s claim that he “saved or created nearly 150,000 jobs” in his first 100 days with the stimulus bill, and they decided it was Barely True, because while it’s possible and there’s anecdotal evidence for it, that figure is effectively based on guesses made by the White House itself about where unemployment would have been. Bottom line is, it’s almost impossible to know.
Only a quarter of the Stimulus money has been spent, 200E9/1E6=200E3. So more like 200k per job.
Plus the calculation is a little more complicated, some of the money spent comes back in the form of increased tax revenue, and if you spend a billion dollars reinforcing a bridge, while obviously a sizable chunk of that money goes to building materials and directly to jobs, you also get a fixed bridge you won’t have to put money into later.
I’m not sure if you considered the fact that $288 billion of the stimulus was tax cuts in your calculation.
Or that large portions went to Medicaid funding ($87 billion), unemployment benefits ($40 billion), and food stamps ($20 billion). Obviously large portions of the infrastructure expenses ($80 billion) went to material costs, not worker’s salaries.
That is generally the measure used, but I can’t be sure that it is in that particular report. If so, those numbers (based on 2008 GDP) would be $173 - $460 billion. The CBO report also claimed that only 25% of the $787 billion has entered the economy ($200 billion or so). So, that range could either be called a minor failure or a pretty solid success (surprise!).
You also have to balance jobs saved against those lost. Sure if you loan the bank money, those might be jobs saved. But all the banks did was cut off credit to small businesses, which went out of business. So thus by saving the big banks, small guys got cut off.
Now there’s no questions to save the big banks was a LOT more helpful than helping the little guys but you also have to minus out all jobs lost by keeping on jobs saved.
You also have to minus out jobs potentially created. Suppose the government hadn’t bailed out GM. Now I’ll make up these numbers so you get my point. Let’s say a million jobs were saved. But had the government allowed GM to go down, undoubtedly some of those workers would’ve found jobs at other companies that were able to create jobs by the lack of competition. So let’s say the potential was 10,000 new jobs created by lack of competition. You have to minus the 10,000 not created from the million jobs saved for a net of 990,000
As you can see, statistics can easily be manipulated to get any answer you desire.
Yes, as soon as you incorporate TARP or the GM bailout the question is much more difficult to answer (not that considering only the stimulus is easy, as we’ve seen in this thread).
However, since TARP was passed by Bush and GM was bailed out by both Bush and Obama, I didn’t really consider them germane to the question of how many jobs Obama has saved.
FYI: you’re conflating the stimulus, TARP, and the auto bailouts, which is done way too often. Most of the replies thus far have been about the stimulus, not the bailouts.
Not that that affects your point about manipulating stats…