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. 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.
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).
So was it 150 Billion Dollars to save 650K jobs, or was it 787 Billion to save 1 Million jobs? And how many jobs have been lost? Somebody do the math.
