By: John ShafferFriday November 13, 2009 The Obama administration is touting the "success" of its economic recovery program by proclaiming that it has "created or saved" 640,329 jobs since its stimulus plan was signed into law. Note the precision of that number, with that exact "329" on the end - conveying the impression that it has been meticulously and intricately calculated. This would lead us to believe that the administration would have at its fingertips the precise breakdown of how many were "saved" and how many "created." It does not. The President's press secretary was unable to answer that question.

Well - here is our take on it: all 640,329 were "created" - in the sense that they are concocted, fictionalized, made up. After all, if one were to write that 640,329 jobs were created or saved, most people would think that employment has increased by that amount. Yet, it has not increased, but has dropped, by millions. The "saved or created" terminology has been criticized by many, not the least of whom is Democrat Senator Max Baucus, who noted that it allows the administration to claim success no matter what the actual numbers are, on the pretense that things would have been worse without its stimulus. As one observer says, if the government claims it "created or saved" a certain number of jobs, it could just as easily be claimed that it has "destroyed or prevented" a much larger number.

Many groups and news agencies have taken that 640,329 number and divided it into the amount of money spent so far on the stimulus and arrived at a "cost per job created" figure. These range from $92,000 to $337,000, depending on which of the administration's spending numbers is used. The administration ridicules such "simplistic" math, but the fact remains that the economy has shed jobs, not added them; and that the administration's own statistics are questionable.

Upon taking office, the administration had claimed that unemployment could go as high as 9% if no action were taken. It assured us that it would go no higher than 8% if the stimulus package were passed. The US unemployment rate is now at 10.2%. The US economy lost 558,000 jobs in October. It has lost roughly half a million jobs every month since the stimulus was passed.

Let's cut to the basics: the private sector, not the government, is the engine of growth. Government spending may be calculated as a boost to the economy, but in reality it can prevent the economy from boosting itself. Markets are self-correcting, and often the hardest thing for a politician to do is to let it correct by itself. After all, by the administration's own claims, things are worse now than they would have been if nothing had been done. In other words, and by their own words, unemployment would be no worse today if nothing had been done, and we would have more money in our pockets and a much smaller budget deficit.

One more thing - none of the government's calculations take into account those things that the private sector would have done with that $787 billion stimulus if it had been kept by businesses and consumers, spent or invested as they wanted to do, instead of how the government wants it spent.

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