Fiddling the Jobs Figures
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This seems to be equal parts deliberate chicanery, and laughable ineptitude:
STIMULUS WATCH: Salary raise counted as saved job.
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....
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.
...officials defended the practice of counting raises as saved jobs.
"If I give you a raise, it is going to save a portion of your job," HHS spokesman Luis Rosero said.
Which makes me wonder, if you
don't get a raise, what portion of your job have you lost? And how do they count pay cuts? (A hypothetical question, I agree: government employees never get their pay cut.)
On top of this accounting fiction, there is also rampant innumeracy:
At Southwest Georgia Community Action Council in Moultrie, Ga., director Myrtis Mulkey-Ndawula said she followed the guidelines the Obama administration provided. She said she multiplied the 508 employees by 1.84 — the percentage pay raise they received — and came up with 935 jobs saved.
Well, duh. To calculate a 1.84% increase you multiply by
1.0184, not 1.84. In fairness, I don't know if this woman is unable to do junior-high arithmetic, or if she was slavishly following a "cookbook" set of instructions that was written by a mathematical dunce. Either way, the result is the same: you can't trust any of the numbers coming from the Obama administration.
(Hat tip to
Ragnar on the forum.)
Brad
- Wednesday 04 November 2009 - 08:58:05
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