White House: Stimulus responsible for almost 25,000 jobs in Ga.

By Jeremy Redmon

The Atlanta Journal-Constitution

Nearly 25,000 jobs have been created or saved so far through stimulus spending in Georgia, the federal government reported Friday.

Most of those 24,681 jobs are in state or local governments or public school systems, according to state officials. At least 17,067 jobs were created or saved for teachers, college professors, police officers and other positions. The rest are in the private sector. State and federal officials have not kept track of how many of the jobs are new.

Nationwide, 640,329 jobs have been created or saved with about $158.7 billion in federal taxpayer funds awarded to the states. Of those jobs, about 325,000 are in education and more than 80,000 are in construction, according to the White House said.

Federal officials have cautioned against calculating the price for each job because most of the stimulus money has not been spent, some projects have not yet begun and hiring is continuing. In all, $4.1 billion in stimulus dollars have been awarded in Georgia. But only $1.3 billion has been received.

“The majority of those contracts are well under halfway completed, so there is much more hiring in the pipeline,” Jared Bernstein, Vice President Joe Biden’s chief economist, told reporters in a conference call Friday.

Bernstein said the early numbers indicate the program is on track to reach President Barack Obama’s goal of 3.5 million jobs by the end of next year.

Critics of the $787 billion federal stimulus program note that the unemployment rate has climbed since Obama signed the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act in February. The nation’s unemployment rate is at 9.8 percent, up from 8.1 percent in February. Georgia’s rate is at 10.1 percent, up from 9.2 percent in February.

“While the administration is playing with numbers and redefining reality to demonstrate success, hardworking families are only seeing jobs slip away and their tax dollars go down the drain,” said U.S. Rep. Tom Price, a Roswell Republican. Price added about the Obama administration: “All they can point to is government and bureaucratic employment.”

Still, economists say the spending has lessened the impact of the recession by preventing a greater loss of jobs. But they also question how long some of the stimulus-funded jobs will last.

“What are these school systems going to do because tax revenue is going to be down again when these contracts are up at the end of the year,” said Don Sabbarese, director of the Econometric Center at Kennesaw State University. “Are these jobs going to disappear? I don’t think the state government is going to be ale to fill in the lost money that was used to save these jobs.”

Georgia ranks sixth among states, Puerto Rico and Washington, D.C., in terms of jobs created or saved with stimulus funds, according to the federal Recovery, Accountability, and Transparency Board. California ranks first with 110,185 jobs. Wyoming ranks last with 860.

Meanwhile, a news report published this week raised some doubts about the first set of numbers reported on recovery.gov. The federal government reported on the Web site this month that 30,383 jobs have been created or saved through federal stimulus contracts alone. The Associated Press, however, reported that figure is overstated by at least 5,000 jobs.

The AP said its review found some counts were more than 10 times as high as the actual number of jobs; some jobs credited to the stimulus program were counted two and sometimes more than four times; and other jobs were credited to stimulus spending when none was produced.

The AP highlighted how recovery.gov, for example, said 280 jobs were created or saved through $199,998 in federal stimulus spending on three semi-trucks and trailers and a modular classroom and bathroom for the East Central Technical College campuses in Fitzgerald and Douglas, Ga. But 280 actually represents the number of students who would be trained with the trucks and modular building, said Mike Light, a spokesman for the Technical College System of Georgia.

“It was an honest mistake,” Light said.

The White House responded to the AP article in a news release Thursday, saying the errors represented only a small fraction of the stimulus spending and that the latest information on recovery.gov got three weeks of review “and will not have similar problems.”

Ed DeSeve, a senior adviser to Obama on the stimulus program, said the AP article “looks at only a small portion of the data – an initial upload of data representing just 2 percent of recovery act spending – that was made publicly available before a full review of its accuracy could be done. Virtually all of the errors found by the AP had already been found by our review.”