Recovery.gov range of mistaken data expands

November 5, 3:56 PMChicago Economic Policy ExaminerJames McConnell

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It isn’t just education where job creation figures reported on the federal RAT Board website Recovery.gov have proven inaccurate. In addition to the situations we covered earlier where schools were reported to have saved or created more jobs than they have teachers on their payrolls, it seems other areas of the stimulus spending are also over reporting job preservation or creation statistics.

For a particularly egregious example, Fayetteville National Cemetery in Arkansas used $1,047 in stimulus cash to purchase a single lawn mower. The agency reported to Recovery.gov that its lawn mower purchase saved or created 50 jobs. Huh?

The real criticism of the stimulus spending, beyond the obviously outrageous job creation claims of some of the reporting government agencies, is that, despite President Obama’s promise that 90% of the stimulus created jobs would be in the private sector, of the 640,000 jobs the web site claims were created or saved by stimulus appropriations, 325,000, or more than 50%, are in the public sector. So much for accuracy of economic predictions.