White House: 650,000 jobs saved, created by stimulus
By Alec MacGillis
Copyright by The Washington Post
Friday, October 30, 2009; 11:07 AM
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/10/30/AR2009103001095.html?hpid=topnews
Reports to be released Friday on the government Web site Recovery.gov are expected to show that the $150 billion in grants and loans made so far under the economic stimulus package have created or saved about 650,000 jobs, White House officials said Friday morning.
White House officials said the reports -- which were filed by state and city governments and other recipients of stimulus grants and loans -- will confirm their recent estimates that the $787 billion package passed in February has so far saved or created about a million jobs, putting it on track to match their estimates of 3.5 million jobs created or saved over the three-year span of the stimulus. That calculation is based on the fact that today's reports do not include much of the package's spending -- tax cuts, safety net spending and fiscal aid to strapped states, which injected tens of billions more into the economy and, in the case of the state aid, forestalled layoffs of state workers.
And because the reports were required only of the direct recipients of stimulus funding and any secondary level of recipient, the reports also do not take into account the jobs that might have been created by subcontractors or suppliers further down the chain. For instance, if a state received a grant and passed it on to a city, and the city then passed the money to a contractor or nonprofit group, any jobs created by the contractor or nonprofit would not necessarily be reported back.
More generally, watchdog groups caution that the reports ought to be taken with a strong grain of salt given the difficulty of actually tallying the effect of government spending. The reports include claims of tens of thousands of teaching and other public-sector jobs saved by the spending, but it is hard to know for sure how many jobs actually would have been lost in the absence of the stimulus. And it is hard to know how to count the job creation in, say, a road repaving project that employs a given crew for a month or two. The reports' bigger value probably will lie in the potential they offer the public for tracking specific projects.
Nonetheless, the White House is poised to make the most of Friday's numbers, with Vice President Biden appearing at noon in Washington to tout the numbers alongside Maryland Gov. Martin O'Malley (D) and California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger (R). The reports follow Thursday's report that the economy grew at a rate of 3.5 percent in the third quarter, which economists attribute in large part to the stimulus package and subsequent boosts such as the summer's Cash for Clunkers program.
Republicans, meanwhile, have been questioning the stimulus's impact, calling into doubt the administration's job creation estimates by noting that the unemployment rate has climbed to 9.8 percent. At the time of the stimulus's passage, administration economists Christina Romer and Jared Bernstein predicted that the stimulus would keep unemployment at 8 percent.
Since then, the White House has argued that the recession has turned out to be deeper than it and most others expected, with about 7 million jobs lost so far, and that the unemployment rate would have been far higher without the stimulus spending. At a speech at American University this week, Bernstein said that without the stimulus, the economy probably would not have expanded at all in the past quarter.
"There's no conceivable stimulus package that could be fiscally or economically responsibly implemented that could fully offset the magnitude of these losses," he said. "But by saving or creating 3.5 million jobs, which we're on track to do, we can put a serious dent in that pain."
Today's reports follow the release Oct. 15 of reports for a more limited slice of spending, about $16 billion in direct federal contracts that were reported to have created about 30,000 jobs.
Schools Are Where Stimulus Saved Jobs, New Data Show
By MICHAEL COOPER and RON NIXON
Copyright by The New York Times
Published: October 30, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/31/us/31stimulus.html?_r=1&th&emc=th
The best symbol of the $787 billion federal stimulus program turns out not to be a construction worker in a hard hat, but rather a classroom teacher saved from a layoff.
On Friday, the Obama administration released the most detailed information yet on the jobs created by the stimulus. Of the 640,239 jobs recipients claimed to have created or saved so far, officials said, more than half — 325,000 — were in education. Most were teachers’ jobs that states said were saved when stimulus money averted a need for layoffs.
Although the stimulus was initially sold in large part as a public works program, only about 80,000 of the jobs that were claimed Friday were in construction.
Of course, counting jobs that were saved can be a squishier proposition than counting jobs that were created. Teachers have been laid off in some areas — and budget officials say that there would have been more layoffs without the stimulus money — but it is difficult to say with certainty how many teachers would have been laid off without that money.
Indiana, for example, reported saving or creating 13,232 education jobs with its stimulus money, but Cris Johnston, the director of the government efficiency division of the state budget office, said that it was difficult to say whether the state would have actually lost those jobs without the money.
“We can’t make the statement that they were created or retained,” Mr. Johnston said. Indiana, he said had followed federal guidelines in reporting how many full-time jobs were paid for with the stimulus money, which also paid for education supplies and other expenses. And while New York City officials have said the stimulus helped them save thousands of teaching jobs, it would have been politically difficult for Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg to actually lay off that many teachers while running for re-election.
Hard hats could surpass teachers next year, as more construction projects get under way. In Florida, for instance, one of the biggest infrastructure projects is its plan to build the Indian Street Bridge in Martin County. But with a big, complex project like that, it takes a while before construction can start. That project, which will cost more than $72 million, claims to have saved or created just one job so far.
An analysis by The New York Times of the grants and contracts in the stimulus showed that as of the end of September, only 7 percent of the work had been completed and 9 percent was more than half done, while 46 percent was less than half done and 38 percent had not begun.
The jobs announced Friday were created by about $159 billion in grants, loans and contracts made available to the states. About $37 billion of that amount has been paid out so far.
The Obama administration said the jobs were evidence that the stimulus was on track to save or create 3.5 million jobs by the end of next year.
Officials did not count jobs that were indirectly created by the $84 billion pumped into the economy through tax cuts so far, or from the billions of dollars’ worth of unemployment benefits and aid to states for Medicaid. If those were included, the administration estimated, the tally of jobs saved or created would rise to more than 1 million.
“There is strong and mounting evidence that the recovery act is putting people back to work,” Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. said at a news conference in Washington.
The figures should be taken with a grain of salt, though. They come from reports submitted by more than 130,000 recipients of contracts, grants and loans that were published on the government’s Web site, www.recovery.gov. But officials expect there to be errors; the first reports of federal contracts earlier this month contained some filings that overstated or understated jobs.
The jobs reports came a day after new figures showed the economy grew by 3.5 percent during the last quarter, ending the longest economic contraction since World War II. But while many economists credited the stimulus with spurring some of that growth, many in Washington have raised doubts about the stimulus program’s effectiveness at creating jobs.
Republicans have cited the high unemployment figure, at 9.8 percent, as proof of the failure of the stimulus, which they voted overwhelmingly opposed. Democrats said that the recession was more severe than most economists predicted and credited the stimulus with helping avert a second Great Depression.
The House Republican leader, Representative John A. Boehner of Ohio, questioned what had happened to the many private-sector jobs that the administration had promised to create.
“While Washington keeps spending and piling more debt on the backs of our children and grandchildren,” he said in a statement Friday, “out-of-work families keep asking, ‘where are the jobs?’ ”
Sensitive to such criticisms, the Obama administration invited a marquee Republican to the White House to praise the stimulus: Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger of California, whose state has faced perhaps the most severe budget crisis in the nation.
“Some of our colleagues are saying that it hasn’t done much, or was a waste of money,” Mr. Schwarzenegger said, sharing the stage with Mr. Biden. “Well, I would dispute that.”
He said the stimulus had created or saved more than 100,000 jobs in California, the most in the nation, more than half of which — 62,000 — were the jobs of teachers, professors and school administrators. Mr. Schwarzenegger noted that some people have questioned whether those teachers would actually have been laid off without the stimulus. “No, those teachers would have been gone, if it wouldn’t have been for the federal stimulus money,” he said.
Michigan, whose unemployment rate of 15.3 percent was the highest in the nation, reported creating or saving 22,514 jobs, the ninth most in the nation. But Rhode Island, whose 13 percent unemployment rate made it the third highest in the nation, ranked near the bottom with 2,012 jobs.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment