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"How can anyone claim success when unemployment is almost 10%?" That was Chip Reid's paraphrase of incredulous critics on CBS in response to the White House's estimate that $159bn of this spring's stimulus spending has reduced unemployment levels by 640K jobs. Reid offered the counter-argument by Vice President Joe Biden: "Without the stimulus, it would be even higher." ABC's White House correspondent Jake Tapper stated flatly that "it is impossible" to verify Biden's data. "There is no uniform set of standards as what it means to save a job versus to create a job, no way to verify that someone would actually have been laid off without the stimulus money." CNBC's economist Steve Liesman conceded on NBC that there are "probably some questions that might surround some numbers" before concluding that "there is an attempt being made by this administration to be transparent about these data."
So where are these saved or created jobs? CBS' Reid reported claims that 325K of the 640K are in education and 80K in construction. CBS sent two correspondents to corroborate. Ben Tracy in Los Angeles told us that $7bn in federal funds out of the $100bn assigned to education nationwide ended up in California yet there were still 20K teaching jobs lost statewide anyway. Tracy told us that the state cut its education spending by $6bn so, without the federal subsidy, the layoffs would have climbed to 82K. In Chicago, Dean Reynolds showed us a small business expansion, a job training program and road building projects, all of which would not have happened sans stimulus.
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