It was reported yesterday that the number of jobs that have been “created” or “saved” is a dubious number. From The New York Times:

The 640,000 figure, announced by the White House with some fanfare last month, came from reports filed by recipients of the stimulus money, many of which have been shown to be inaccurate or overstated since they were made public. But the watchdog, Earl E. Devaney, the chairman of the Recovery Accountability and Transparency Board, said that it was also possible that the figure understated how many jobs were affected. Up to 10 percent of the recipients had not filed the required reports showing how many jobs they had created or saved, he said.

The actual number could be higher or lower. Let’s do some quick math. This stimulus has been to the amount of $787 billion dollars. The number of jobs “created” or “saved” is stated by the current administration to be around 640,000, which isn’t a small number to be sure. Let’s divide the 787,000,000,000 dollars by the 640,000 jobs. On my calculator the number is just over 1.2 million dollars per “job.” Is that not bad enough? It seems that at least a handful of the jobs “created” were really payraises:

A series of embarrassing reports  of raises being counted as new jobs, of jobs claimed in Congressional districts that do not exist, of school districts claiming to have saved the jobs of more teachers than they employ  may have ended up undermining confidence in the stimulus program.

And more:

Also Thursday, a report issued by the Government Accountability Office identified significant problems with the jobs numbers. It found that 58,386 of the jobs were being claimed by recipients who had not reported spending any money; on the other hand, recipients who had received nearly $1 billion had claimed no jobs at all.

One seventh of the jobs saved were not saved by stimulus money? That’s nice. I’m also uncertain how many jobs are being lost by the way that government is funneling money. Any time that contracts are created by forced government spending, something that would ordinarily have happened does not. Did that make sense? Basically, the government can only shift money and/or jobs. It does not really have the ability to create jobs, however much it might look like it. So says Austrian economic theory, which I think has a better model of government inflation than the other branches. Most of the people I heard calling this recession (depression?) before it happened held to it. One of our Republican representatives read the dictionary definition of “propaganda” to those at the hearing. Before you applaud too loudly, don’t forget that both the Republicans and Democrats (as a whole) were wanting a stimulus at the end of last year. All they’re bickering about now is how the money should be spent, and perhaps a little about the size. Republicans and Democrats mostly balk at the price tag of the other party’s ideas. Why not their own? On a related note, have you seen the voting records for the health care bill, H.R. 3962?