8,100 “Stimulus” Jobs In SC? Where?
The administration of U.S. President Barack Obama says that 8,100 jobs have been “saved or created” in South Carolina thanks to the $787 billion bureaucratic bailout it passed back in February.
The South Carolina office that has been tracking stimulus funding isn’t so sure, however.
“I don’t know that we will ever have numbers that we have confidence in,” R.J. Shealy, a spokesman for S.C. Comptroller General Richard Eckstrom, told the Greenville News last week. “It’s that we don’t have faith in the way the feds are counting the numbers. The process is designed to show a higher number of jobs created than are actually created.”
Eckstrom’s office says that the S.C. Department of Commerce has reported only 3,497 jobs “created” by the stimulus – 2,607 of which are tied to a summer youth employment program.
No matter what numbers the Obama administration spits out, however, South Carolina has clearly lost jobs since the bureaucratic bailout was passed.
According to data from the S.C. Employment Security Commission, South Carolina has lost a total of 11,975 jobs since the “stimulus” was passed in February. The state’s workforce has also shrunk by 21,234 as the lack of available employment opportunities – or the inability of the ESC to place people in positions – has forced many to give up hope.
Combined, that’s a net loss of over 33,000 positions in the past seven months.
Of course, government bureaucracies in South Carolina have been immune to that sort of attrition – actually adding 2,100 jobs over the past year.
Comments
By Red on October 31st, 2009 at 5:09 pm
Printing pieces of paper and passing them out as money is one of the best ways to create jobs ever invented. It costs almost nothing to print the paper, which makes me wonder why we didn’t print a lot more and be awash in jobs.
By Ynot on October 31st, 2009 at 6:35 pm
no no it’s saved. banking jobs were saved
By SnakeMD on October 31st, 2009 at 6:44 pm
YOU LIE!!!!!!!!!
By Rod Tidwell on November 1st, 2009 at 1:44 pm
“Say it Jerry, say it with me, Show me the money…”
By confused on November 1st, 2009 at 11:33 pm
i’m so f’ing sick of this “created or saved” nonsense. the media picks it up like it actually means something. i haven’t heard one news program (though i confess, it’s a small sample as i pretty much just get npr on the way to/from work) stop and say “wait a second…. what the hell is a ’saved’ job?”
show me how many actual people have jobs who previously did NOT have jobs as a result of the stimulus. someone, anyone, produce that number.
By Sam @ MOD jobs on November 3rd, 2009 at 2:42 am
A saved job is the nonsense that was thrown into the sentence so it would give them something to fall back on in case no new jobs were actually created. It also allows them to pad out the number of jobs that were apparently created.