This from The Hill, off their “Pundits Blog”:
According to an Associated Press story about how the administration is overcounting stimulus jobs “created or saved” they outline an example where a group that employs 508 people somehow “saved” 935 jobs at their organization.
As the AP story points out, somehow, by giving their employees pay raises with stimulus funds, it counted as jobs “saved.” A government spokesman at the Department of Health and Human Services said, “If I give you a raise, it is going to save a portion of your job.” Huh? I still can’t really figure that one out. But that’s not even the best part.
You see, the Obama administration gave strict instructions to those receiving stimulus cash about how to figure out how many jobs they were “saving” by handing out raises and other benefits. Just multiply the number of employees by the percent pay raise they got. In the example above the grantee multiplied 508 times 1.84 and arrived at the 935 “jobs saved” figure. The director of the organization told the news outlet, “I would say it’s confusing at best, but we followed the instructions we were given.”
Now, I famously took college algebra five times (and dropped it multiple times) before finally passing it and graduating. But even I know that 1.84 percent would be expressed as .0184. If you were to multiply .0184 times the 508 employees—rather than 1.84 times 508—you would find that, according to the fuzzy math of the administration, they “saved” nine jobs, not 934.
I had to laugh at his closing snark:
At this rate, I wonder how many jobs the $165 million in AIG bonuses would have “saved”?
Great post.