Mark Twain must be rolling over in his grave. The man who popularized the phrase “There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies and statistics” would no doubt be incredulous over the wild imagination of this administration and its attempts to portray the failed “stimulus” program as a success.
The Augusta Chronicle reports that the University of Georgia, the state’s largest university, claimed to have saved over 1,700 jobs with “stimulus” money this summer. As we’ve come to suspect, this number is far from the truth – the “stimulus” money was actually used to pay the salaries of faculty and staff, the amount of which worked out to about 1,700 salaries for the month of August. This month, and the months to come, the staff will be paid through other more traditional means. There will be no jobs reported as “saved or created” in September. An official defended the school, citing the university was “"We're just using their methodology, and calculating it as we were instructed.”
Universities aren’t the only educators failing the grade. East Central Technical College in Georgia reported that the $200,000 in federal funds they received would create 280 new jobs, although the money actually went to train (and not hire) 280 students. With federal reporting requirements resulting in such hugely erroneous estimations of the actual effect of the President’s $787 billion package, taxpayers are getting tired of the President’s statistical spin.