Keep it real in tracking stimulus jobs

Inter Lake editorial

It is unnerving to see how Montana's two senators and their staffs so easily passed along highly exaggerated job creation estimates for the Flathead Valley - estimates that were handed to them by President Barack Obama and the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.

Sens. Max Baucus and Jon Tester boasted in a press release that the Flathead City-County Health Department would get $1.3 million in federal stimulus funding that would create 40 new jobs. But the department's director told us the money would allow the Community Health Center to stay in operation for another fiscal year with just two more than its current 10 employees. The department has since revised that projection, saying the stimulus money may allow for hiring up to six or seven additional employees over the next year.

Well, good. We're glad the Community Health Center has found more funding. It is a worthy project and we wish it well.

But that doesn't get the senators off the hook. There's a big difference between 40 jobs and two jobs, and even if the health center hires an extra 7 people, that's still 33 short of the 40 noted by Baucus and Tester.

This was probably just part of a tendency to hurry information out the door, and everything associated with the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act - from its inception to its rush through Congress - has certainly been hurried. But that's the point here. Montana's senators should slow down and take a much closer look at what they are being fed and what is being fed to the American people.

Because of the hyper-inflated job creation estimates for our local health department, we have every reason to question numbers being espoused by the Obama administration for national job creation.

Just as the 40-jobs claim was being made for the Flathead, Barack Obama and the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services were announcing that $155 million was being allocated to 126 community health centers across the country and that the spending would create 5,500 new jobs.

Maybe. Or maybe not. Some of the funding could be for new health centers that will involve substantial job creation elsewhere, but it's also possible that "politics as usual" did not end with the Bush administration.

We have asked for an explanation as to how these estimates are being generated, and finally Thursday we got some kind of answer. According to a representative from the federal health department, "The job estimates for these grants are based on a national average and … past experience. Generally, a fully implemented center serves an average of 6,000 health center patients and supports approximately 45 jobs. That breaks out to a ratio of one full-time employee per 135 patients. The Flathead Community Health Center grant application indicated that they estimated that the funds will help serve 6,000 patients. The ratio mentioned above and past experience gave us an estimate of 40 jobs."

The American public shouldn't just blindly accept these types of projections. They should be wary of the cleverly phrased Obama administration claim that $787 billion in stimulus funding will 'save or create" more than 3 million jobs. It will be impossible, after all, to ever know how many jobs will be 'saved" due to the largest single spending bill in world history.

This is not a time for flim-flammery with economic statistics. It is a time to demand scrutiny, transparency and accountability. And Baucus and Tester should lead the way for Montana.