November 4, 2009
Obama’s “saved” jobs weren’t saved after all, employees just got a raise.
In Obama’s mind, giving a person a raise counts as saving their job:
President Barack Obama’s economic recovery program saved 935 jobs at the Southwest Georgia Community Action Council, an impressive success story for the stimulus plan. Trouble is, 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.
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.
That type of accounting was found in an earlier AP review of stimulus jobs, which the Obama administration said was misleading because most of the government’s job-counting errors were being fixed in the new data.
The administration now acknowledges overcounting in the new numbers for the HHS program. Elizabeth Oxhorn, a spokeswoman for the White House recovery office, said the Obama administration was reviewing the Head Start data “to determine how and if it will be counted.”
But 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.
Wait, and Dubya was is supposed to be the dumber of the two? That, like the logic of counting a job that got a raise as a job that was saved, just doesn’t make sense. How does giving someone a raise save a portion of their job? I’m confused.
And, should government employees really be getting raises when the government so clearly should be cutting back on spending, at all levels? Does that make sense? There aren’t too many government employees, or private sector employees, dumb enough to leave a paying job in this economy with an unemployment rate about to hit 10%. These people shouldn’t have been receiving raises in the first place. I’m a federal employee. We get a raise at least once a year, if not twice, automatically. We get the adjustment for inflation at the beginning of the year and, as long as you don’t monumentally screw up, you get what is called a “step increase.” This is an automatic raise of about $1,000 a year.
I don’t buy any of Obama’s claims about jobs created or saved by the “stimulus” bill. Why? Not because I’m a partisan jerk who refuses to believe anything Obama says, but because there’s just simply no way of knowing. His claims can’t be proven. Who is to say these jobs weren’t saved or created in spite of the stimulus, rather than as a result of it? We will never know.
As Ed Morrissey points out over at HotAir, if a position is getting a raise, or the person in a certain position is getting a raise, that means their job wasn’t in jeopardy in the first place. This leads me to wonder, as I wonder with most liars, does Obama think that we’re that dumb or is Obama so dumb that he doesn’t see the stupidity in his claim? Because, he either knows how ridiculous it is but is so arrogant he thinks the masses won’t realize how ridiculous it is or he’s so dumb he actually believes that these count as jobs saved. Either way, it’s not looking good.
(H/T: Memeorandum)
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