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.

And they said that they had found and corrected significant errors in the data submitted in 57,000 separate reports to the federal government by Recovery Act funding recipients.

“I have dishpan hands, I’ve been scrubbing the data so hard,” joked Ed DeSeve, a Senior Advisor to the President for Recovery Act Implementation. DeSeve said his staff found one error of over thousands of jobs in the data before it was released publicly, and asked the recipient to resubmit accurate information.

“The data isn’t perfect,” DeSeve said. “Further updates and corrections will be needed.”

Critics have seized on the White House’s definition of jobs “created or saved” to call into question just how great the economic boost from the stimulus has been, especially at a time when the unemployment rate is approaching 10 percent. But the White House is counting both kinds of jobs the same in its overall tally of the stimulus impact.

The White House said 325,000 jobs were saved or created in the education sector – where many jobs are in the “saved” category as states used stimulus dollars to plug massive budget gaps that could have led to teacher layoffs. Another 80,000 are construction jobs.

Still, Jared Bernstein, the chief economist and senior economic advisor to Vice President Joe Biden, said he is confident that the stimulus bill “saved or created over a million jobs, and we’re on track to save or create the 3.5 million jobs we estimated over the life of the recovery act.”

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

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. The spending categories that required reporting were state fiscal support for education, private workers hired on federal contracts, and many grants to non-profits and local governments.

As of September 30, the White House said, $340 billion in funds and tax cuts had been obligated. Recipients of $159 billion of that were required to report jobs figures. And it was that $159 billion that generated the 640,329 “saved or created” jobs, officials said.

That boils down to a cost per job of $92,000, Bernstein said.

But for all the detail, he said that the data do not show whether the jobs are in the government or in the private sector. That’s because, he said, much of the money was sent to states, which in turn hired a mix of contractors and government employees to carry out tasks. 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.”

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.”

Let’s see the government has spent the equivalent of what I earn in nineteen months to create or save a job and they don’t even know how many jobs were saved in each category and whether the jobs were public or private.  I could have created at least three entry level jobs in my office for the same amount of money. 

At these prices I can hardly wait for government run health care.

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