PORK

The 50-job lawnmower, and other Porkulus job fables
posted at 1:36 pm on November 13, 2009 by Ed Morrissey

We’ve been aggregating tales of Porkulus fantasy jobs, but this one takes the cake. Give the New York Times credit for catching this last week, adding Arkansas to the growing list of states with ridiculous levels of inflation in an already-ridiculous calculation of “saved or created” jobs. In Fayetteville, the government website claimed that the sale of a single lawnmower saved 50 jobs:

In June, the federal government spent $1,047 in stimulus money to buy a rider mower from the Toro Company to cut the grass at the Fayetteville National Cemetery in Arkansas. Now, a report on the government’s stimulus Web site improbably claims that that single lawn mower sale helped save or create 50 jobs.

Earlier that same month, when Chrysler got a $52.9 million stimulus order for new cars for the government, the struggling automaker claimed that the money did not save a single job.
Those two extremes illustrate the difficulties in trying to figure out just how many jobs can be attributed to the $787 billion stimulus program. Last week the Obama administration released reports from more than 130,000 recipients of stimulus money in which they claimed to have saved or created more than 640,000 jobs, but a review of those reports shows that some are simply wrong, while others contain apparently subjective estimates.

They contain “subjective estimates”? If subjective is a synonym for false, then that last statement is accurate. Claiming 50 jobs saved from the sale of one $1000 lawnmower is not subjective. It’s ridiculous and fraudulent, and the system that allows the government to make that claim is the source of the ridiculousness and fraud.
The same kind of thinking went into the claim that $890 for nine pairs of shoes saved nine jobs:

Moore’s slice of the stimulus came in an $889.60 order from the Army Corps of Engineers for nine pairs of work boots for a stimulus project.
Moore says he’s been supplying the Corps with boots for at least two decades. This year, because he provided safety shoes for work funded by the stimulus package, he said he got a call from the Corps telling him he had to fill out a report for Recovery.gov detailing how he’d used the $889.60, and how many jobs it had helped him to create or save. He later got another call, asking him if he’d finished the report.

“The paperwork was unreal,” said Moore, who added that he tried to figure out how to file the forms online, then gave up and asked his daughter to help.
Paula Moore-Kirby, 42 years old, had less trouble with the Web site, but couldn’t work out how to answer the question about how many jobs her father had created or saved. She couldn’t leave it blank, either, she said. After several calls to a helpline for recipients she came away with the impression that she would hear back if there was a problem with her response, and have a chance to correct it. So with 15 minutes to go before the reporting deadline, she sent in her answer: nine jobs, because her father helped nine members of the Corps to work.