“It may be a fact that that’s what’s on my Web site, but that may not be the correct number,” Earl Devaney, a White House official, testified this week.
When pressed as to why there was so much inaccurate and false information about where the stimulus money is going, the White House’s official spokesperson stated, and I quote…
“Who knows man. Who really knows?”
Followed by…
“We’re not certifying the accuracy of the information.”
WHAT!!!??
The White House admits that they are not certifying any of the figures they are using on their website to sell the success of the stimulus plan to the American people. Unbelievable.
I can’t wait until these same people make life and death decisions about my health care.
Our boy Earl is the chairman of the Recovery and Transparency Board, which is responsible for monitoring the stimulus. Apparently Earl posted a whopper of a tale on his website, recovery.org (an official government website) about how many jobs were “created or saved” by the stimulus plan. Good ‘ol Earl. He makes me laugh.
As I’ve said before, there’s no way to prove how many jobs you’ve saved. So that’s a cop-out by the government so they can just make up a number. And here’s Earl jawing about his website that’s supposed to provide the evidence of job creation to the good ‘ol boys in Congress and he’s forced to admit, it just ain’t right. Then our government admits they aren’t going to check any of it to make sure it’s true.
All they care about is getting that number of “jobs created or saved” out on the 6 o’clock news so everyone who just swallows whatever is fed to them from TV will think the government is doing a great job and the stimulus is working. If they only knew that number is based on reams of data that when independently certified turns out to be completely false or inaccurate, and that the government has no intention of verifying on its own. Of course they don’t. They know if they did, they’d have to admit the stimulus isn’t working, so it’s just easier to say, “we will not certify the accuracy of the information.” But that won’t stop them from saying how great their stimulus plan is working.
According to The Wall Street Journal, “The administration has been scrambling in recent days to respond to growing evidence that the data underlying its claim that the stimulus “created or saved” the equivalent of more than 640,000 full-time jobs is flawed in a variety of ways. Thousands of recipients of stimulus money ranging from small contractors and non-profit organizations to state and local governments struggled to accurately complete lengthy forms designed to account for stimulus spending and the resulting jobs. In the process, some stimulus recipients claimed to have created jobs that didn’t exist, reported spending money they hadn’t received, and listed their addresses in non-existent Congressional districts.”
As just one example of rampant inaccuracies in the stimulus “job creation” number, an article in The Boston Globe discovered that $77,181 dollars in stimulus money for Bridgewater State College was listed as creating 160 full-time jobs. How many were actually created? “Almost nothing,” according to Bridgewater State spokesman Bryan Baldwin. In other cases where federal recipients receive money anyway, the money they were given was re-classified as stimulus money. They didn’t even know it was stimulus money until they were asked to complete the forms. What a fraud! Just “reclassify” money the government’s been providing to people anyway for years under some other name, and now just call it “stimulus money” and then claim that all those people’s jobs were now “saved.”
If anyone did that in the private sector, we’d be watching them get loaded into police cars in handcuffs, but for our government, it’s just another day at the office.
Categories: Government Failures, Unemployment & Labor Law
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