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Those stimulus job numbers from Congress? Not so solid
House Democrats this week credited stimulus road and transit projects with creating or sustaining nearly 50,000 jobs. But a close look shows the estimate suffers from what's become a common malaise in the stimulus world: fuzzy math.
Interviews and spot checks with states that provided job counts to the committee uncovered some glitches, in particular a reliance on raw head counts–which tend to inflate the numbers by giving full- and part-time jobs the same weight–and by counting the same workers two, three or four times.
One way around the problem is to use what's known as full-time equivalents–the hours worked on stimulus projects divided by the hours in a typical work week (43 for construction jobs). By that measure, the stimulus provided the equivalent of a mere 9,920 full-time jobs since March, when the first projects broke ground. But that's probably shortchanging things–after all, even part-time work is a job.
The truth is probably somewhere in the middle. But whatever the figure, it's certainly well short of the 1.6 million workers who've been added to the unemployment rolls since March.