Stimulus report card due on jobs

By Jeremy Redmon

The Atlanta Journal-Constitution

The federal government is preparing to report this month how many jobs have been created or saved through stimulus spending, giving a first look at how the program is working in Georgia and the rest of the nation.

Under the bill that created the $787 billion program in February, states, counties and school systems that receive the taxpayer money are required to report quarterly to the federal government on how they are spending it and how many jobs have been created or retained. The first reports are due Saturday.

Federal and state officials say they plan to make the information public Oct. 30. They caution, however, not to draw strong conclusions from the reports because only a fraction of the $6.4 billion set aside for Georgia has been spent.

Some economists say the spending has at least reduced the severity of the recession.

“The fiscal stimulus was needed and necessary and I actually think it is serving its purpose,” said Jeff Humphreys, director of the Selig Center for Economic Growth at the University of Georgia. “No jobs were really created. We just saved jobs. We didn’t lose as many as we would have lost.”

Federal and state officials expect a lot of questions about how they tally jobs. One method they use to total “full-time equivalents” involves taking the cumulative number of hours worked in jobs created or retained through stimulus projects and dividing that by the hours in a full-time schedule.

For the so-called “fiscal stabilization” funds used to shore up government budgets amid the recession, Georgia is taking the total amount of stimulus funds given to a local school district, for example, and dividing that by the district’s average salary.

State officials say they had no federal guidance about how to calculate jobs linked to that funding, although a spokesman for the federal Office of Management and Budget disputed that.

Marietta-based C.W. Matthews Contracting Co., a road-builder that has been awarded 33 Georgia Department of Transportation projects totaling $122 million in federal stimulus funds, estimates the spending helped save 100 to 200 of its employees who otherwise would have been laid off.

Yet thousands of workers have been laid off across the state’s road-building industry during the recession, despite the federal stimulus spending, said David Moellering, executive director of the Georgia Highway Contractors Association.

Moellering said the industry is grateful for the federal money but not enough has been dedicated for transportation in Georgia.

“What the stimulus has done is postpone some layoffs,” he said. “It has not created any new jobs. We wish it would.”

In January, the White House projected the spending would create or save as many as 3.6 million jobs nationwide. Of that number, 106,000 are supposed to be in Georgia over the next two years, according to the Council of Economic Advisers. In September, the council estimated that about 1 million jobs had been created or saved through the spending so far.

Critics have scoffed at those numbers, noting that the nation has continued to lose hundreds of thousands of jobs each month since February, when President Obama signed the stimulus legislation.

Rep. Tom Price, R-Ga., chairman of the Republican Study Committee, said last month that the council’s estimates were based on “fuzzy math” that “bears no resemblance to anything our children learn in school.”

The national unemployment rate has risen since Obama signed the stimulus legislation, from 8.1 percent in February to 9.8 percent last month, although most economists expected a continued rise this year.

During the same time frame, Georgia’s unemployment rate rose from 9.3 to 10.2. Between February and September, the state shed 81,048 jobs.

However, the number of people filing for unemployment benefits for the first time in Georgia has dropped for each of the past two months.

“These stimulus initiatives are short-term initiatives designed to lessen the pain,” Georgia Labor Commissioner Michael Thurmond said, “but I don’t think anyone ever thought it would resolve this recession or the issues associated with it.”