I think somebody has messed with Joe

Here's Brett J. Blackledge, writing for the Associated Press. The title of his article should've been "While Biden Slept".

WASHINGTON – The White House has abandoned its controversial method of counting jobs under President Barack Obama's economic stimulus, making it impossible to track the number of jobs saved or created with the $787 billion in recovery money.

No serious economist takes the "jobs created or saved" chant seriously. It's an impossible number to know. Money is taken from the public, or their unborn grandchildren in this case, and thrown out there with other money. Taking the money away from you costs jobs in the areas where you would've preferred to spend it. But once it's stolen from you, the money doesn't stay segregated in the stash of the recipient. There is no way to tell how many jobs were created or saved because of the wealth transfer.

I think this is the Obama administrations way of saying "we're not gonna just let people make this shit up any more. We're going to invent a consistent bullshit formula. If you got money from us, and you're paying employees, then money given = jobs saved."

Despite mounting a vigorous defense of its earlier count of more than 640,000 jobs credited to the stimulus, even after numerous errors were identified, the Obama administration now is making it easier to give the stimulus credit for hiring. It's no longer about counting a job as saved or created; now it's a matter of counting jobs funded by the stimulus.

Ok, take the dollars given to your hypothetical company in kickbacks stimulus. Deduct the amount you gave in bribes campaign contributions. Divide the remainder by the average hourly rate at your company. That's how many hours of work you can pay for with that money. Multiply that by 2080, the number of hours in a year, assuming a 40 hour work week. There's your jobs "saved" in Obamathematics.

So if your company got a million dollar kickback stimulus check in exchange for a $5,000.00 bribe campaign donation, the math would look like this: A $1,000,000.00 government check minus a $5,000.00 donation divided by $20.000 per hour average rate, divided by 2080 hours in a year equals 23.91 jobs created or saved for the year.

Brilliant economic thinking. Brilliant. You just throw a million bucks into the pile, and you can claim that it "created or saved" a million dollars worth of jobs. And if you think THAT doesn't make a lick of sense, read the next paragraph:

That means that any stimulus money used to cover payroll will be included in the jobs credited to the program, including pay raises for existing employees and pay for people who never were in jeopardy of losing their positions.

Franklin Delano Roosevelt jumping up and down on a Keynesian pogo stick in Jimmy Carter's stagflation peanut patch, what a bunch of Geithner guano. Let's say that you have 32 neighbors on your block, and each family, including yours, pays $33,333.00 in taxes each year. That's 33 families each paying $33,333.00 to equal that $1,000.000.00 in question.

What were you and the other 32 families going to do with that million dollars if the government hadn't taken it? Were you going to leave it under your mattress? Were you going to burn it? Were you going to give it to Mark Penn, Hillary Clinton's ex-pollster, who got six million porkulus dollars to help publicize the switch from analog to digital?

Hell no. You were going to spend it on clothes, food, a guitar amp, a dachshund sterilization program, Jim Beam, washing the truck, a vacation trip to watch them film "Stossel", a new laptop, or (God help us all) college tuition. That million dollars, divided by the average hourly rate at Wal-Mart (clothing), Big Rodrigo's House O' Grease (food), Guitar Center, the veterinarian, the Jim Beam distillery, the car wash, Stossel's film crew, Dell, or (God help us all) Texas A&M University - this would've paid all the people that you chose to pay. Not the people that Barry, Nancy and Harry want to pay.

That's what this is about. The choice is taken from you, and given to them. (But why do so many stimulus supporters call themselves "Pro Choice" on other issues?)

The money in this utterly ludicrous system is taken from your job-funding programs and given to theirs. And when you do look at the growth of companies Nuzzling On The Nurturing Obamabreast, but deduct the job LOSSES at the places where you would've preferred to spend the money, then deduct the amount government keeps for itself, you're looking at a net job loss. It really is that simple.

You could be doing things with the ridiculous amount of money being taken from you. You are the best judge of the best companies and the best jobs to support with your money.