jobs saved

Why Obama’s Party Is Going Down

/ Jack Marshall / 1 Comment

The excuses are already coming fast and furious as President Obama and his party faces a rebuke in Tuesday’s election of historic proportions. The lack of accountability so far may be forgivable; after all, nobody admits they have done a lousy, hypocritical, incompetent and dishonest job while they are running for re-election. The voter’s fury and the Democrats’ peril are being blamed, alternatively and collectively, on George Bush, on Sarah Palin, on racism, on the sad stupidity of the American public, who just are so impatient and unsophisticated that they don’t comprehend all the wonderful things that have been done for them.  It’s also the Supreme Court’s fault for allowing large corporations the right of free speech, although the union money flowing to Democrats as the result of the same decision has dwarfed corporate money.

All of these excuses are demeaning to Obama and his party, and insulting to the intelligence of everyone else.

The reason the Democrats are going down to a party that had thoroughly disgraced itself out of power just two years ago, is illustrated by a shocking report that barely caused a ripple in the news cycle. Continue reading →

How to Lose Trust

/ Jack Marshall / 2 Comments

The AP reports that the White House, in measuring the effects of the economic stimulus program, is counting employee raises in salary as “jobs saved.”

“More than two-thirds of 14,506 jobs credited to the recovery act under spending by just one federal office were overstated because they counted pay increases for existing workers as jobs saved,” Brett Blackledge and Matt Apuzzo write. This kind of Orwellian funny business with definitions is an old trick, of course, but also the kind of  deception that President Barack Obama was supposed to eliminate. It is, after all, dishonest. It would be better to learn that this was the inadvertent mistake of some secretary somewhere, but no: according to the story, the Administration stands by its calculations, and defended the use of raises as “jobs saved.”

“If I give you a raise, it is going to save a portion of your job,” HHS spokesman Luis Rosero said.

Rosero then proceeded to sell the reporter a share of the Brooklyn Bridge. One of the resullts of this “logic” is that  it allows the Administration to save more jobs than there were in the first place. For example, to measure the jobs saved at the Southwest Georgia Community Action Council,they multiplied the 508 employees by 1.84 — the percentage pay raise they received — and voila!  935 jobs saved!

The problem with this, besides the obvious (it’s ridiculous!), is that it erodes the President’s most precious commodity: trust. People who twist facts and numbers like this are either con-artists or incompetents, and you shouldn’t never trust either. Today the papers were all about Democrats worried about the election results, but in the long run, this story is much more ominous.