White House Inconsistent on How Many Jobs it has Created
Addressing his Middle Class Task Force today, President Obama said steps taken by the Administration over the past year "have saved or created about 2 million jobs so far."
But just yesterday, three of his top aides were on the Sunday talk shows and each of them had a different number from the other.
•On NBC's Meet the Press, senior advisor to the president Valerie Jarrett offered the vaguest assertion that "the Recovery Act saved thousands and thousands of jobs."
•On Fox News Sunday, White House press secretary Robert Gibbs offered greater certainty saying that largely as a result of the recovery plan, money has been put "back into our economy that saved or created 1.5-million jobs."
•And on CNN's State of the Union, White House senior advisor David Axelrod was firm on the number but seemed hesitated on the correct description saying "the Recovery Act the president passed has created more than – or saved more than 2 million jobs."
So which is it? How many jobs can the Administration claim credit for and were they saved and/or created?
At his daily press briefing today, Gibbs was asked about the discrepancies in the numbers. He was quick to refer reporters to the January 13th study by the President's Council of Economic Advisors. It analyzed the spending and impact of the $787-billion Recovery Act and concluded that "[a]s of the fourth quarter of 2009, the (Act) has raised employment relative to what it otherwise would have been by 1 ½ to 2 million."
That would mean that three of the four officials cited above could claim to be correct. Mr. Obama and Axelrod went with the high-end estimate of two million jobs and Gibbs on the low-end at 1.5-million.
"Maybe I'm guilty of being less of a glass half-full kind of guy than David Axelrod," said Gibbs, with tongue-in-cheek, in explaining his assertion.
The report argues that a job is considered saved if it keeps an employee at work who otherwise would have been laid off were it not for funds from the Recovery Act. A job is created if a recipient of Recovery Act funds certifies that certain employees were hired solely because of the funding received from the Act.
While the Economic Advisors stand by their numbers, they make it clear in their report that their estimates are just that – and "are subject to substantial margins of error."
At the same time, the Economic Advisors assert that their findings "are strong enough and clear enough that we are confident that the basic conclusions are solid."
In government as in the private sector, inaccurate numbers are often preferred to no numbers at all.
