United Liberty

We’ll be talking about this in Monday’s podcast, but the Government Accountability Office (GAO) has confirmed that the number of the jobs “created or saved” is inaccurate:

Administration reports that more than 640,000 jobs were created or saved by the government’s $787 billion stimulus program are inaccurate due to flawed reporting from recipients of the money, a report from the Government Accountability Office shows.

About 10% of those jobs – more than 58,000 – were  created as the result of projects that so far have reported spending no money, the GAO study issued on Thursday found. Another 10,000 projects that have spent a total of $965 million reported creating no jobs. As many as 10% of stimulus recipients did not report anything to the government’s Recovery Board, the agency created to track the money.

The faulty reporting was the subject of a hearing Thursday by the Senate Committee on Government Oversight and Reform, which has been investigating the use of the stimulus money.
[…]
Among the findings outlined in the GAO report or reported at the committee hearing Thursday or in the press are; reporting errors that included overstating the amount of money received, in one case by billions of dollars because of a misplaced decimal; reporting of hundreds of millions of stimulus dollars spent in Congressional Districts that don’t exist; and the reporting of the amount of money received in the “jobs created or saved” field.

A report released Wednesday by the Franklin Center for Government & Public Integrity said it found that for all 50 states more than $6.4 billion in stimulus money was shown as being spent and more than 28,400 jobs saved or created in 440 districts that don’t exist.

This shouldn’t surprise anyone. The administration was banking on recovery coming much quicker than it has and used the “stimulus” package as a reason for recovery. If the economy didn’t recover quickly, then they could turn right around and say it’s because the first stimulus was large enough.