Wednesday, July 29, 2009

What was it I was just saying...

...about how the government spins job creation by way of federal grant money?

PORTLAND, Ore. — How much are politicians straining to convince people that the government is stimulating the economy? In Oregon, where lawmakers are spending $176 million to supplement the federal stimulus, Democrats are taking credit for a remarkable feat: creating 3,236 new jobs in the program's first three months.
But those jobs lasted on average only 35 hours, or about one work week. After that, those workers were effectively back unemployed, according to an Associated Press analysis of state spending and hiring data. By the state's accounting, a job is a job, whether it lasts three hours, three days, three months, or a lifetime.
...
At the federal level, President Barack Obama has said the federal stimulus has created 150,000 jobs, a number based on a misused formula and which is so murky it can't be verified.

Wow. Of course, none of this is surprising, as anyone with any grasp of economics knows. This sort of thing has often been likened to filling the deep end of the swimming pool by dipping water from the shallow end, and you could say that's more or less exactly what it is. I don't know who in the hell thought a one-time shot of money into the economy, especially one of this nature, was going to make for a sustained economic boost. Wouldn't tax cuts work better for that, considering they're effectively a multiple-year, sustained injection of money into the economy? Or is that the evil capitalist in me talking?