Creating (or saving!) jobs data

Even those who believe that 650,000 jobs were created-or-saved aren't impressed with the numbers:

According to a Washington Post article on this these 650,000 jobs, they were created or saved by the $150 billion in grants or loans having been dispersed through the stimulus. A little simple math shows that this means those jobs cost an average of $230,769 each. That seems kind of expensive to me, given that I doubt many of these jobs pay anything close to six-figure salaries.

Mr. Indiviglio can apparently toss around "created or saved" with a straight face.

The "data" behind the number is, er, pretty shaky. From the Politico:

White House officials announced Friday that they had counted exactly how many jobs were created or saved by recent stimulus spending: 640,329.

So how many were saved and how many created? They don’t know.

In a briefing with reporters, officials acknowledged they can’t tell the difference between jobs “saved,” and jobs “created” by the $787 billion stimulus package.

They said they also can’t tell the difference between private sector jobs and government jobs.

But they're sure it's a lot! Like, you know, 90% private sector!

Bernstein said that the White House’s earlier estimate that 90 percent of the jobs would be in the private sector, though, is “still valid.”

Heh.

But it's all extrapolated from something or other:

Bernstein arrived at the 1 million number by extrapolating from the portion of recovery act funds for which the recipients were required to report jobs figures to the total amount allocated so far. . . .

And, he conceded, “there’s no data element in any government data set that is absolutely precise.”

That we can believe.

Bottom line Punch line:

The issue of whether governments can accurately count jobs “saved” – since that is a hypothetical has provoked debate among economists since the White House began using the “saved or created” formulation earlier this year. Critics have argued that the recipients of the data have every incentive to inflate the number of jobs they planned to cut if they hadn’t gotten federal money. But DeSeve said that the White House left it up to the people reporting the numbers to make that determination for themselves. “What we have to do is rely on the fact that our public officials are honest,” he said. “We don’t differentiate in the reporting between created and saved jobs.”

Yes, let us always rely on the perfect integrity of our public officials.

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