Fiddling the Job Figures
From WendyMcElroy.com
This seems to be equal parts deliberate chicanery, and laughable ineptitude: STIMULUS WATCH: Salary raise counted as saved job.
About two-thirds of the 14,506 jobs claimed to be saved under one federal office, the Administration for Children and Families at Health and Human Services, actually weren’t saved at all, according to a review of the latest data by The Associated Press. Instead, that figure includes more than 9,300 existing employees in hundreds of local agencies who received pay raises and benefits and whose jobs weren’t saved.
…officials defended the practice of counting raises as saved jobs.
“If I give you a raise, it is going to save a portion of your job,” HHS spokesman Luis Rosero said.
Which makes me wonder, if you don’t get a raise, what portion of your job have you lost? And how do they count pay cuts? (A hypothetical question, I agree: government employees never get their pay cut.)
On top of this accounting fiction, there is also rampant innumeracy:
Well, duh. To calculate a 1.84% increase you multiply by 1.0184, not 1.84. In fairness, I don’t know if this woman is unable to do junior-high arithmetic, or if she was slavishly following a “cookbook” set of instructions that was written by a mathematical dunce. Either way, the result is the same: you can’t trust any of the numbers coming from the Obama administration.
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