Outside the Beltway: Inventive Math Makes Stimulus Work!
Posted July 30th, 2009 at 2.40pm in Ongoing Priorities.
PORTLAND, Ore. – How much are politicians straining to convince people that the government is stimulating the economy? 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.
“Sometimes some work for an individual is better than no work,” said Oregon’s Senate president, Peter Courtney.
With the economy in tatters and unemployment rising, Oregon’s inventive math underscores the urgency for politicians across the country to show that spending programs designed to stimulate the economy are working — even if that means stretching the facts.
- Author: Gerrit Lansing
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July 30, 2009 James Raider, WA writes:
Government Capping Compensation?
The government is not improving the lot of shareholders, but is escalating its own intrusion into the boardrooms of America.
http://pacificgatepost.blogspot.com/2009/07/government-capping-compensation.html
Sweeping expansion of government incompetence into corporations is an invasion that will not be reversed. In the meantime, there is need for a fix in the process of corporate governance.