First Hard Data on Stimulus Released

(CBS/AP)  Updated 11:28 a.m. Eastern

Businesses receiving federal contracts under President Barack Obama's economic stimulus program reported creating or saving more than 30,000 jobs in the first months of the program, according to data released Thursday by a government oversight board.

The numbers, based on jobs linked to less than $16 billion in federal contracts, represent just a sliver of the $787 billion stimulus package. But they offer the first hard data on the early effects of the program. Until now, the White House has relied on economic models to argue that the program created jobs and eased the recession. Critics point to rising unemployment to argue it wasn't worth the cost.

The data rebut criticism that the stimulus simply padded the government payroll, creating only public-sector jobs. The businesses reporting jobs ranged from small roofing companies hired to repair military buildings to large corporations paid to clean up nuclear waste.

But the numbers represent such a small snapshot, they are unlikely to significantly change the debate over whether stimulus was the right prescription for an ailing economy.

The report card reflects agency data but not recipient data, which will not be reported until October 30th. CBS News producer Laura Stricker reports that recipients are now frantically working to file information with the government about what money they received and what they are doing with it.

In addition, the agencies themselves are widely varied on how many details they submitted to Recovery.gov. Some departments were very thorough, while others just submitted lists with little detail.

Jared Bernstein, the chief economic adviser to Vice President Joe Biden, said it was too early to draw conclusions from the data "but the early indications are quite positive."

The White House has repeatedly played up the impact of the Recovery Act, with Biden traveling the country to stress its effectiveness. He will be talking up the Act today in St. Louis at the County Police and Fire Training Center.

Bernstein, following the White House line, said "the direct count by Recovery Act recipients of jobs created or saved from this small percentage of the Recovery Act exceeds our projections." He said it was further evidence that the stimulus provided "a much needed lift in a very difficult period for our economy."

In the short term, the most significant thing about the job numbers may be that they exist at all. The government has never before attempted to track the effects, in real time, of a huge government program. The data released by the independent Recovery Accountability and Transparency Board allow taxpayers to see not just where their money is going, but what the government is getting in return and how many people are on the job.

Broader numbers on local stimulus spending, for everything from repairing public housing and building schools to repaving highways and keeping teachers off the unemployment lines, won't be available until late this month. Those figures are expected to show early stimulus money saving thousands of teaching jobs and creating construction work for highway projects nationwide.

Taken together, the two batches of data will offer a head count of people working on stimulus projects. Because nobody knew what to expect from the numbers, the White House set no goals and raised no expectations for what they would reveal.

The reporting does not attempt to measure jobs created by $288 billion in tax cuts or the sizable increases in spending on Medicaid and unemployment benefits. The White House has said that, when considering those factors and estimating the ripple effect through the economy, more than 1 million jobs have been created or saved so far.

Obama has set a goal of creating or saving 3.5 million jobs by the end of next year. Since signing the stimulus in February, Obama has watched the economy shed millions of jobs as unemployment climbed higher than his economists predicted. The White House says things would have been far worse without the stimulus.

Contracting jobs are normally temporary and some are part-time. Auditors, fearing businesses would use part-time jobs to inflate the numbers, required companies to convert all jobs numbers to full-time. That means a 20-hour-a-week roofing job is counted as half a job.

Check out the full report at recovery.gov.

[eimorfin]

$787 Billion? Does that include interest? WOW... "hope and change"? At this point "hope and change" in 2010 and 2012!!!!

[Treadlightly2]

Better yet.

Recovery.gov

[Treadlightly2]

Really want to track the money?

FedBizOpps.gov

Dig in.

[mjlewis6]

The downward spiral in the employment sector began some 9 years ago and continued through the fall of 2008 when markets crashed. The greed on Wall Street regarding VRMs was what pushed that collapse, but it was not the sole cause. The rise in spending fueling deficits without any relief regarding war spending....There is a political solution as well as an economic one, but neither is platable to
Washington, DC with congressional elections coming.

[jschmidt27]

Wow what an accomplishment. Obama Biden are such magicians. They really rock. Now when are they going to create some reall jobs. $787 billion bill was sold by the magician saying it would create jobs. Instead it went to the Dems pork projects. That's real change.

[kaylag04]

30,000 jobs "created or saved" by $16 billion? That's a heck of a deal at over half a million dollars per job! There must have been more $500,000.00 jobs saved than created though, because I didn't see those position vacancies advertised at all!

[19632001]

Why is such a stupid thing dominating the news channels. We are rewarding bad behavior because parents are not watching their children.

And what's REALLY stupid is that the balloon was empty. So you have a huge crowd including the police, looking at an empty balloon.

Who pays for all this wasted time? Now this family will dominate every morning show tomorrow morning, Good Morning America, The Today Show, The CBS Morning Show. What a total waste of time.

[curse914]

by clowry1611 October 15, 2009 6:04 PM EDT
i am so tired of the iraq war being shoved off on bush and the repub war mongers. you know if there had been a democrat in office at that time we still would have gone to war with iraq. only thing is that the repub's would not be criticzing the president 8 years later for making that decision like the dem's who love to live in the past

[][][][][][][]

The crowd that was behind Preemptive War were to some extent Nixon era parasites and in the case of Paul Wolfowitz, a minion of the Fascist Leo Strauss. Wolfowitz and Richard Perle approached Clinton in 1998 to invade Iraq, did he?

You are most certainly not Nostradamus.

[velma179]

CBS


WHY DO YOU KEEP MESSING WITH THE COMMENT BOARD?



Instead of just arbitrarily changing it around every few months... Could you leave it alone...

or Better!!! let US decide whether to load comments old-to-new or new-to-old...


PLEASE.

[banders6]

by hungry1968-16 October 15, 2009 6:14 PM EST
I can guarantee you, that government employees pay federal taxes, state taxes, local taxes, FICA, etc, etc, etc.
Working for the government DOES NOT make someone "tax exempt".
Not in America anyway.

Well you're missing where the money comes from that they pay back to the government. It is tax money paid by businesses, so the money they pay back is money they get from business, so businesses pay their salaries thus businesses pay their taxes. They only send businesses money back, it would be better if they didn't pay any back, then they would only get pure salary from businesses taxes and cut out the IRS expense.