Bailout

The table lists US job losses by month

From the fuzzy math department:

$72,408 Per Stimulus Job? White House Says No
http://blogs.abcnews.com/politicalpunch/2009/10/72408-per-stimulus-job-white-house-says-no.html
Five hundred billion dollars in stimulus monies for spending were appropriated last February. Of that, $143 billion in stimulus funds have been spent so far.

Just $16 billion of that was directly awarded by the Federal government; most of the money went to states and localities to spend.

Of the $16 billion awarded, $2.2 billion has actually gone to these contractors to create jobs.

Today the White House released data indicating that 30,383 jobs were directly created by these stimulus dollars.

"It is too soon to draw any global conclusions from this partial and preliminary data,” Recovery Act Chief Economist Jared Bernstein said in a statement, “but the early indications are quite positive. The direct count by Recovery Act recipients of jobs created or saved from this small percentage of the Recovery Act exceeds our projections. “

Basic math would indicate that $2.2 billion spent to create 30,383 jobs would indicate a cost per job of $72,408.

But the White House rejects this.

Recovery Act spokeswoman Elizabeth Oxhorn says that “this contract money doesn’t just go toward labor/wages for workers - it also funds things like purchase of equipment and supplies which also creates jobs.”

Moreover, she points out that “the job numbers reported by recipients and posted today are only direct jobs - or those workers whose paychecks are funded directly by the Recovery Act. That hits the labor/wages part of the equation, but there are also jobs created and saved from the purchasing of equipment and supplies (known as indirect jobs) and the additional purchasing power workers on these projects have that they wouldn’t without the job (known as induced jobs) that is not reflected in these numbers - which, of course, affects the bottom line of doing averages like this one. When you account for all of the non-direct jobs, much different scenario.”

(The 30,383 jobs figure will be updated; the White House “is temporarily withholding the data from two of the 5,232 federal contract recipient reports until the two recipients can correct their obviously incorrect submissions,” a statement on the Recovery.gov website says.)

Bernstein says that “All signs -- from private estimates to this fragmentary data -- point to the conclusion that the Recovery Act did indeed create or save about 1 million jobs in its first seven months, a much needed lift in a very difficult period for our economy. We look forward to the much larger, comprehensive report due on October 30th.”
[More at the link...]

Dems seek cover to boost debt limit
http://www.politico.com/news/stories/1009/28586.html
The Senate must soon increase the national debt limit to above $13 trillion — and Democrats are looking for political cover.

Knowing they will face unyielding GOP attacks for voting to increase the eye-popping debt, Democrats are considering attaching a debt increase provision to a must-pass bill, possibly the Defense Department spending bill, according to Democratic and Republican sources.

Adding it to the defense bill would allow Democrats to argue that they voted for the measure to help troops in harm’s way — and downplay that their vote also expanded the limit for how much money the country can borrow.

The strategy has not yet been finalized, aides and senators said. The House already approved a debt limit increase of $925 billion — above the $12.1 trillion ceiling Congress approved as part of the economic stimulus package last February — but Democrats may seek to increase the limit further so they don’t have to revisit the politically treacherous issue until after the 2010 midterm elections.

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STIMULUS WATCH: Salary raise counted as saved job
http://www.google.com/hostednews/ap/article/ALeqM5jMNoef6xDenBbHWO0Im6rIjDmAgAD9BOJH300

WASHINGTON — 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.

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[More at the link...]