Roman Around

President Barack Obama and his party may have taken it on the chin last evening, but when it comes to defying the laws of science (i.e., walking on the water), and defying the tenets of reason (i.e., health care costs will not go up despite adding tens of millions to the insurance rolls), no one can touch him.

Add to that list, his ability to defy the laws of mathematics.

I admit to not knowing much about the Southwest Georgia Community Action Council. It doesn’t come up in conversation much here in New York City’s forgotten borough, Staten Island – although my Big Apple tax dollars are being funneled that way, so perhaps I should pay better attention.

A quick look at their website reveals that they are an “advocate for the poor since 1965.” Their mission statement says, in part, that they are “making the Economic Opportunity Act of 1964 a reality in Southwest Georgia by helping socially and economically disadvantaged persons help themselves through a variety of programs.”

Good for them.

For those keeping score at home, there are a total of 508 people employed by the Southwest Georgia Community Action Council. 

That’s 508 total jobs.

But thanks to President Obama’s magical, all-healing, all-curing, all-saving $787 Stimulus Package, a total of 935 jobs were saved there.

That’s 935 jobs.

Yes, President Obama somehow saved 427 more jobs than actually exist at the Southwest Georgia Community Action Council.

Now that is success.

I know there is no Nobel Prize for Mathematics, but there needs to be one.

Brett J. Blackledge and Matt Apuzzo of the Associated Press write:

The Georgia nonprofit’s inflated job count is among persisting errors in the government’s latest effort to measure the effect of the $787 billion stimulus plan despite White House promises last week that the new data would undergo an “extensive review” to root out errors discovered in an earlier report.

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.

That type of accounting was found in an earlier AP review of stimulus jobs, which the Obama administration said was misleading because most of the government’s job-counting errors were being fixed in the new data.

The administration now acknowledges overcounting in the new numbers for the HHS program. Elizabeth Oxhorn, a spokeswoman for the White House recovery office, said the Obama administration was reviewing the Head Start data “to determine how and if it will be counted.”

But 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.

Huh?

I didn’t realize that giving someone a raise qualifies as having saved that job. Is that the same accounting technique that counts someone who may have been out of work for even one day as being included among the millions who have no health care insurance? Or those who smoked cigarettes for even six months as a teenager as being included among those who died from cigarettes?

And what does a “portion of your job” mean?

I’m confused.

Did the Stimulus Plan only save fractions of jobs? And if so, wouldn’t that mean that there were actually more than 935 jobs to begin with that enabled a total of 953 jobs to be saved in a place that really only employs 508?

And what if someone didn’t get a raise, but remained employed. That doesn’t count as a “saved job”?

We should ask President Obama. He’ll know what to do.

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