The Blackboard

Wow, even assuming that it’s only sloppy work on entering district numbers, the amount of dollars needed to save or create new jobs is staggering. $1.5M for 0.3 jobs in the Northern Mariana Islands. That comes to $5M for a single FTE! Seems to me that for that kind of money on those kinds of islands, that person’s job should be guaranteed until the rising sea levels swollow them up

Ared–
I think figuring out how to count jobs created or saved is very difficult. Obviously, mistakes will be made.

But even if people don’t make obvious mistakes, how do you decide whether or not you really would have fired a person or group of people if stimulus money hadn’t come around?

A school district might have 10 potential options to cover a salary. Suppose the really want to employ someone to do “X”– say an band director for the middle school.

The first method to pay for “X” might vanish, but they could hunt around for various programs and find another way to pay for “x”. Once they find money, they don’t fire the band director.

If stimulus money comes, they use the stimulus money for now. But would they have fired that person if there was no stimulus money? Maybe they would have kept looking and found something. Sometimes, you really don’t know.

Also, sometimes what happens when new money with strings attached arrives is that those in charge of finances the new money to pay the salary of someone they would not have fired. This saves money in programs that might have no strings attached. Then, they use the savings to something else.

So just because the money covers a salary, that doesn’t mean a job was created or saved. This is especially true if the money was used for something that was not a salary or hour wages. The saved money might be paying for computers in classrooms, or trips, or something. Buying the computers will contribute to someone’s job somewhere, but some of the money goes to materials etc. Also, the computers may be manufactured in another country.

Mind you– the money might be spent wisely– but that doesn’t mean it’s a job!

At the same time– sometimes the new money really does save jobs. It’s just hard to tell. (This probably contributed to the mistakes on the part of school district members reporting the number of jobs created or saved. They didn’t know. )

This is what happens when you throw (someone else’s) money at an imaginary problem. The problem itself is poorly defined or demonstrated, and meaningful results of the money toss are difficult for common folk to ascertain.

Of course, the people in charge know this already, it’s their M.O., in fact. It’s the We Have To Do Something charade.

Andrew

Long ago, I worked for a multi-national that was prone to having staff cutbacks every time it wasn’t doing very well. Almost always about 10% of total numbers. This was no problem as we always had a stock of empty heads. When things looked better we got approval to add the empty heads back in to the total staff numbers. Given those circumstances a stimulus package could save a lot of empty heads from being cut from the payroll. The empty heads occupied real jobs and there was real funding to pay them. Technically they and their jobs existed, we just knew neither who they might be nor to whom to send their paychecks.

Alex