Spinning the Stimulus

Meredith Jessup | July 29, 2009 5:05 PM

Lawmakers are struggling to show their constituents some solid results stemming from government stimulus plans that spent billions of dollars to try and spur the economy. However, how much of what they are telling you is fact, not political spin?

In Oregon, where lawmakers are spending $176 million to supplement the federal stimulus, Democrats are taking credit for a remarkable feat: creating 3,236 new jobs in the program's first three months.
But those jobs lasted on average only 35 hours, or about one work week. After that, those workers were effectively back unemployed, according to an Associated Press analysis of state spending and hiring data. By the state's accounting, a job is a job, whether it lasts three hours, three days, three months, or a lifetime.
At the federal level, President Barack Obama has said the federal stimulus has created 150,000 jobs, a number based on a misused formula and which is so murky it can't be verified.

Don't buy the spin--claims based on a lot of fuzzy math.