President Obama, asked if he would consider legalizing prostitution, marijuana and non-violent crimes as a remedy to boost the economy, answered: “That will not be my job strategy.”
Ski Roundtop’s job fair continues Saturday from 9 a.m. to noon.
WASHINGTON — The White House is promising that new figures being released Friday will be a more accurate showing of progress in President Barack Obama’s economic recovery plan. It aggressively defended an earlier, faulty count that overstated by thousands the jobs created or saved so far.
Ed DeSeve, serving as Obama’s stimulus overseer, said the administration has been working for weeks to correct mistakes in early counts that identified more than 30,000 jobs paid for with stimulus money. He said a new stimulus report Friday should correct many mistakes an Associated Press review found that showed the earlier report overstated thousands of stimulus jobs.
“I think you’ll see a pretty good degree of accuracy,” DeSeve said in an interview.
White House spokesman Robert Gibbs downplayed errors in job counts identified by the AP’s review, telling reporters, “We’re talking about 4,000, or a 5,000 error.”
The AP reviewed a sample of federal contracts, not all 9,000 reported to date, and discovered errors in one in six jobs credited to the $787 billion stimulus program — or nearly 5,000 of the 30,000 jobs claimed so far.
Even in its limited review, the AP found job counts that were more than 10 times as high as the actual number of paid positions; jobs credited to the stimulus program that were counted two and sometimes more than four times; and other jobs that were credited to stimulus spending when none was produced.
For example:
– Some recipients of stimulus money used the cash to give existing employees pay raises, but each reported saving dozens of jobs with the money, including one Georgia day care that claimed 129 jobs saved.
– A Texas contractor whose business kept 22 employees to handle stimulus contracts saw its job count inflated to 88 because the same workers were counted four times.
– The water department in Palm Beach County, Fla., hired 57 meter readers, customer service representatives and other positions to handle two water projects. But their total job count was incorrectly doubled to 114.
Those errors were included in an early progress report on the stimulus released two weeks ago that featured numerous mistakes, including a Colorado business’ claim that its stimulus contract created more than 4,200 jobs. In fact, the actual count was less than 1,000.
Some businesses actually undercounted jobs funded with stimulus money, the AP’s review shows, because they reported only new jobs created, not existing jobs saved. But by far the most reporting errors were found in the number of jobs credited to the stimulus.
Gibbs said that early data couldn’t be reviewed as carefully as new data will be. “Three days after the data was received, it was required to be put on the Web site,” he said, referring to the government’s recovery.gov site that serves as the official accounting of stimulus data.
The Colorado business’ job count, along with many others, has been corrected, Gibbs said, and will be updated in Friday’s report.
“We disputed, as the AP disputed, the report that came in that calculated a number of jobs but didn’t accurately account, the way we account for, a full-time, yearlong employee as being a job,” Gibbs said.
His comments during his daily meeting with reporters came hours after the White House issued a midnight press release complaining about the AP’s review of jobs the government credits to stimulus spending.
DeSeve, who criticized the AP’s review as misleading, said the administration is aware of problems with the early data. Agencies have been working with businesses that received the money to correct mistakes. Other errors discovered by the public also will be corrected, he said.
“As a result, whatever problems the early and partial data had, the full data to be posted on Friday will provide the American people with an accurate, detailed look at the early success of the Recovery Act,” DeSeve said in a statement the White House issued just after midnight Thursday.
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CHICAGO – Last March when Bill Richardson endorsed then-Candidate Barack Obama during the thick of the heated primary race and while Rev. Jeremiah Wright was burning up the airwaves, Team Clinton was none too pleased.
Former Bill Clinton advisor turned TV pundit James Carville went as far as to call the onetime Clinton Energy Secretary under a modern day Judas for his decision to back Senator Hillary Clinton’s foe. Richardson himself admitted tension, describing the phone call to Mrs. Clinton to notify her of his decision. “Let me tell you: we’ve had better conversations,” he told reporters with an uncomfortable laugh.
But it was his relationship with President Bill Clinton, who has yet to fully forgive his former Energy Secretary, that suffered most. “‘It could be pretty much a permanent fissure. But that’s politics, that’s OK,” Richardson told NPR last month.
On Wednesday, Mr. Richardson was rewarded for his decision to endorse the then underdog candidate during a time when Mr. Obama needed help the most, when he was offered a cabinet role in the new Administration. The President-elect praised Richardson for his breadth of experience and then opened up the microphone to the new nominee, who noted what was at the forefront of everyone’s mind: Mr. Obama’s ever expanding “team of rivals.”
“There are some who speak of a team of rivals, but I’ve never seen it that way,” Mr. Richardson began his remarks. “Past competitors, yes. But rivals implies something harder edged and less forgiving. And in the worlds of diplomacy and commerce, you open markets and mines not with rivalry but instead with partnership and innovation and hard work,” he explained, perhaps aware of the many news reports that would be sure to rehash his relationship with the Clintons.
Richardson, who many considered a frontrunner for Secretary of State, of course did not get that, the most high profile Cabinet job, but was instead named Mr. Obama’s pick for Commerce Secretary. A Telemundo reporter called on during today’s news conference bluntly asked the President-elect if this was a consolation prize to appease Latinos.
“Well, Commerce Secretary is a pretty good job,” Mr. Obama said to laughter, before clarifying the job will play a key role in fixing the economy. “Bill Richardson has been selected because he is the best person for that job, and is going to be outstanding in helping me strategize on how do we rebuild America,” he added.
The soon-to-be President pointed out he’s only appointed half of his Cabinet so far, and predicted his Cabinet and White House staff will be one of the most diverse of all time. “One of the strong beliefs that I’ve always held, and has proven to be correct throughout my career, is that there’s no contradiction between diversity and excellence. I’m looking for the best people, first and foremost, to serve the American people. It just so happens that Bill Richardson is one of those people,” he concluded.
