Stimulus
Too early to tally job creation President Obama’s stimulus package has produced – drum roll, please – 30,083 jobs, according to a federal oversight study of the $787 billion program.
The puny number has both Democrats and Republicans in full spin mode to present the figure in the best or worst possible light.
In truth, these first job-creation numbers, listed on the recovery.gov Web site, amount to a sliver of a slice of the huge program. It’s employment linked to only $16 billion in spending – about 2 percent of the program – doled out so far.
Also, the work is mostly focused on military bases and environmental cleanup at nuclear sites on federal land, mainly in the South and Southeast.
These are projects where the government could get things going quickest, and the work isn’t generally located in needy states with jobless rates above the national average of 9.8 percent such as California (12.2 percent), Nevada (13.2 percent) and Michigan (15.2 percent).
For the White House, the first-blush figures are a sign of good things to come. President Obama believes that one million jobs have already been saved or created via stimulus money funneled through state governments. These figures are due to be vetted later this month.
Overall, the stimulus plan is touted to save or create 3.5 million jobs over two years.
It’s a claim that Republicans say will leave the nation treading water because almost the same number of jobs has vanished this year.
But the tiny sampling of new jobs fall in the construction category, an area that private industry is barely touching as the economy moves forward.
There are overall signs that economic activity is reviving: The stock market has soared by 53 percent since March as major firms are reporting stronger profits.
But it’s also a jobless recovery, one that’s leaving out new hiring, which will stymie future economic growth.
This is a gap that the stimulus program must fill for a broad-based recovery.
Scripps Howard News Service