When the Jennie-o-Turkey company received two stimulus contracts to stock food pantries, it put 384 of its current employees on the job, according to the Wall Street Journal. And when the company reported back on their use of the stimulus money, they reported creating 384 jobs. Whoops!
We’ve added hundreds of new jobs to our “not-really-created-or saved” stimulus map. Two of the new entries come from media reports in the Wall Street Journal and a local South Dakota newspaper, the Rapid City Journal. The others come directly from an Examiner analysis of Recovery.gov data, including pay raises that were counted as new or saved jobs by Head Start programs, and low-paying part-time work study jobs at colleges that were erroneously counted as jobs “created or saved” by President Obama’s stimulus package.
So far, our tally is 93,452 jobs not really created or saved by the stimulus package. If you want to count backward from the Obama administration’s estimate, then it has directly created, at most, 546,878 jobs.
