What the fire department has been up to this week

“While the money will cover one additional employee, it will be filled by someone performing two functions for the department, as both a firefighter and paramedic, he said.”

Huh? Can anyone decipher what that’s supposed to mean? Sounds like a “double-dip” to me.

Isn’t this exactly what’s alleged to be so shady about the “stimulus” and the “jobs created” statistics used to justify it?

Thanks for the clarification, John. Indeed, a bargain for the town, yes, federal funding for one new employee trained to do two functions. Okay, I get that.

But for the federal taxpayer footing the bill, how many “jobs created” will be reported under the stimulus program?

This is important because the stimulus represents a huge pot of debt incurred on the federal level, and all I see is crumbs trickling down. And pressure on the recipients of those crumbs to produce “favorable results.”

For political and bureaucratic reasons the number of “jobs created or saved” being reported in some cases vastly exceeds the number of people actually employed by the funding. And these phony numbers in turn could be used to mask waste and abuse in the program.

In some cases, jobs are being reported in congressional districts that don’t even exist.

My inquiry was whether this would be an instance of more “jobs” reported than employees hired.

ABC NEWS:

“A series of media reports have surfaced in the past week or so, uncovering examples of significant overcounting of stimulus-tied jobs in California, Massachusetts, Texas, Wisconsin, as well several states. For example:

The Boston Globe reviewed the 12,000-plus jobs claimed to have been created or saved by $4 billion in direct stimulus spending in Massachusetts. In one case, a state college reported having added 160 new work-study jobs tied to just $77,181 in stimulus funds. A spokesman for the school, Bridgewater State College, told the Globe that the actual number of jobs was “almost nothing.”

The Globe described the Bay State’s stimulus job figures as “wildly exaggerated.”

A Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel review found a sanitation department in Douglas County, Wis., that admitted to a typo that resulted in an estimate of 100 jobs saved or created, when the actual number was five.

According to USA Today, the Texas recipient of a $26,174 roofing contract reported erroneously that 450 jobs were created or saved when, in fact, six were.”

http://abcnews.go.com/Business/scrutiny-obama-stimulus-jobs-mounting/story?id=9075257