Bumper bowling with jobs numbers at The White House

November 4, 7:35 PMRaleigh Political Buzz ExaminerMatthew Cook

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A meeting of the President's Economic Recovery Advisory Board at The White House, Nov. 2
AP Photo

In bumper bowling every ball you throw will knock down at least some pins because the gutters are filled with inflatable rubber bumpers.  

Team Obama has set up its own bumpers to goose the stimulus job numbers. 

Bumper #1:  Stimulus recipients by law must report jobs ‘created or saved’.  Inherently, the recipient is biased toward reporting some jobs created or saved; who wants to give money to agencies that don’t ‘create’ jobs?  I can only imagine the creative thinking.

 Bumper #2:  Redefining what a job is.  According to the 41-page guide for reporting stimulus jobs, a job = one year’s worth of work, or 2,080 hours.  It’s the total number of hours worked, not how many people were hired.  Under this definition, a job was created if 12 people worked for one month each.  Do you think a month’s work would change anyone’s economic life in a meaningful way?  This is the main problem:  we thought Mr. Obama meant real jobs, not temporary ones.  This is closely related to Bumper #3.

Bumper #3:  Establishing its own standard of success.  For years the brightest minds at the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the Treasury Department, the General Accounting Office, the Federal Reserve, and other agencies have published, and the economy has depended on, sound measurements of employment activity.  The White House has chosen to ignore these standards of measurement and instead create its own, based on political promises, and to create its own bureaucracy for reporting.  The referee is referee of his own work – no independent evaluation is welcome or needed.

Bumper #4:  Jobs reporting free-for-all.  The White House is clear in its 41-page guide:  responsibility for accuracy of the jobs numbers belongs to the primary recipient of stimulus funds.  No federal agency will be auditing the numbers.  Whatever comes in, comes in.  Recipients and sub-recipients alike can report numbers; if they are double-counted (as has been reported by Associated Press), it is the primary recipient’s responsibility to correct (That will happen when all the stars in the Orion constellation burn out and disappear from the sky).

Bumper #5:  Where the people came from to fill jobs does not matter.  Again, it’s the hours of work that count, not the number of people who got jobs or whether they were unemployed beforehand.  We’re supposed to believe these jobs are pulling people off the unemployment line.  Not true.  Former Council of Economic Advisors chairman Ed Lazear wrote about this in Monday’s Wall Street Journal.

Two final comments:  1) Many of the ‘created’ jobs are government jobs.  Please remember that a government job depends on tax revenue to exist (or at least it used to).  Oh, you thought these were private sector jobs that come from real economic growth?  2) Even if true, the reported 640,000 jobs created, at a cost of  $159 billion, comes out to $249,000 per job.  This is success?