How many jobs were created and saved by the Recovery Act?

[saganista]

Originally Posted by theolsarge

"President Bush on Wednesday signed the Economic Stimulus Act of 2008, calling it a "booster shot" for the American economy." That was February 13th. What boost did the Economic Stimulus Act of 2008 do? Nada.

No, it had a significant effect through about mid-summer. The problem with it was that it was disbursed in one lump sum...sort of like a windfall. Too many people either put it in savings or used it to pay off a credit card bill. Those sorts of things weaken the stimulus effect because the rate at which the money turns over in the economy is greatly reduced. That's why you have been getting the Make Work Pay tax credits in little bitty pieces in your biweekly or whatever paycheck. The hope is that the periodic increase in pay will be a small enough amount that it will just bleed out into your regular spending and thus have all the stimulus effect that it can have. That's actually been working very well. Almost everyone has just spent the difference.

[AuDiBelle]

Originally Posted by saganista

If you don't know (and so few of you do), what are you all shooting your mouths off over? If you had any idea of all this, you would never have asked the question. You would have known that you don't estimate jobs saved at all. The analyses estimate the number of jobs that actually exist within the economy and compare that to the most likely number that would have existed in the absence of the stimulus bill. The difference is jobs saved or created. The terminology exists only because you can't say that all of those jobs were newly created (even though there were just under 4.2 million new hires in November). Some part of the difference may be due to some business's plan to fire 250 people that got scaled back to 180 as the result of the stimulus. That's 70 jobs saved, and if you were one of those 70, you thought it was a big deal. But nobody seriously tries to "calculate" saved jobs at all. The term "jobs saved or created" refers to a single number. Not to the sum of two numbers.

The question was more rhetorical as you and I both know that "calculating" a save job is hocus pocus froo-froo quasi-science at best.

Pertaining directly to your bolded statement above (and more importantly the underlined portion), why should anyone have an ounce of faith in the White House estimate of the "likely number of jobs that would have existed in the absence of the stimulus bill?" Their estimate of the unemployment rate with and without the stimulus bill passage were SOOO far off base, that no person of any intellect whatsoever should consider their estimates worth anything more than the paper its printed on.

You only need to know this: the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) - thousands of the most professional and rigorous counters and analyzers of labor data in the history of mankind - makes TWO revisions of employment data for their ESTIMATE of the PREVIOUS month! And even then the reports are mere estimates - an annual benchmark survey is required to reset the nation's payroll baseline.
That is, the best employment statisticians the world has ever known, people whose lives are dedicated to employment data, conducting labor surveys and research, constantly refining their complex models, have a difficult time telling you how many jobs were created in the PAST!

[LEFT]
Read more: Obama's 'Jobs-Saved' Claims Flat Out Untrue, Press Giving Him Pass | NewsBusters.org
[/LEFT]