Marathon Pundit: "Created or saved" jobs lies: Colorado

Tuesday, November 10, 2009

"Created or saved" jobs lies: Colorado

Among the reasons the Democrats cited in passing the $787 billion stimulus was that it would create jobs. The first clue that something was amiss with that bill was when President Obama began crediting the stimulus for "saving" jobs--even though there is not a method to determine what a "saved" job is.

Burt Hubbard of the Denver Post did some digging and discovered that according to the Recovery.gov web site, the stimulus "saved or created" 8,094 jobs. But that figure is inflated by at least 1,000, he says.

Some details:

• Englewood-based TeleTech Government Solutions listed the equivalent of 635 full-time jobs credited to Colorado created by recovery funds used to set up call centers on the conversion to digital television. Only the equivalent of 34 of them were filled in Colorado. The rest are scattered across the country.

• The city of Westminster reported that its $150,438 contract for road work on Lowell Boulevard would create 117 jobs. That would equate to $1,286 per job. The city said the estimate is based on anyone who will work on the project, even if it was for only one day. No federal officials told the city to convert to the number of full-time-equivalent slots, an official said.

• Two child-development centers — one in Colorado Springs and the other in Saguache County — reported they had created or saved more than 292 jobs combined. However, the money — totaling about $650,000, or $2,226 a job — was used to give employees cost- of-living raises. Only three new jobs were created.

• Some subsidized-housing projects listed their entire staffs as jobs retained as a result of stimulus spending even if the money was the same rental assistance for their tenants they had received in previous years. Combined, they could total as many as 200 jobs.