Obamanomics: Touching lives $195,000 at a time

In other words, a temporary, part-time, or seasonal worker can come into a project, work no more than one hour on said project, and that person will continue to appear in the headcount with each report.  They will not be removed upon their departure from the project.

None of this comes as a surprise to those monitoring the efforts of the DOE, however.  The GAO report lists the department as a high-risk agency due to their history of ‘ineffective oversight and poor management’.  The New Mexican reports that, “In reporting statistics for job creation, DOE often reports three different numbers that GAO found confusing and potentially misleading.”

The disparity in the numbers is overwhelming, with the GAO claiming “calculations ranged from about 5,700 jobs to 20,200, depending on the methodology used.”

Frank Munger, who is covering another of the DOE’s projects at Oak Ridge, explains, “Obviously, the job counts done using the “lives touched” method are much, much higher than those that are calculated as full-time equivalents, but it doesn’t appear that DOE has done much to explain the difference in the reports circulating publicly.”

In fact, they not only report these numbers publicly, but fail to provide any context or explanation as to how the numbers were derived.

It’s all part of the overall deception however.  The White House continues to throw out random numbers in their quest to convince the public that their behemoth stimulus bill is saving jobs at a massive rate.

Whether it is created, saved, funded, or touched, the Obama administration’s smoke and mirrors tactics continue.  Perhaps that will change.  Perhaps the American people will see right through these lies.

Perhaps the polls in November will clearly demonstrate how many lives aren’t being touched by the stimulus bill.

Rusty Weiss is a political writer for NewsBusters, and has appeared in the American Thinker, the Daily Caller, and FoxNews.com. He can be reached through his web site: www.mentalrecession.com.