The Washington Post’s Alec McGillis has a good analysis piece on the folly of figuring out how many jobs the stimulus bill has created — and why the Obama administration, Congress and the media are obsessed with such numbers anyway:

As it is, the administration has left itself open to near-daily assaults on the credibility of the jobs numbers. Finding flaws in the data is as easy as shooting fish in a barrel, and reporters have been all too happy to fire away — first reporting the numbers with fanfare when they are announced, despite all their obvious shortcomings, and then, days or weeks later, reporting that they are not entirely sound.

I, um, sort of participated in this kind of journalism for UG, reporting that a White House Council of Economic Advisers summary of stimulus jobs misleadingly counted summer youth jobs as real jobs. So of the 1.1 million jobs created, 227,000 were minimum-wage, part-time, 6-10 week jobs for teenagers and young adults. The point of the piece, though, was that the real story was that summer youth jobs was a decent direct-job creation program that helped vulnerable youth. And now that it’s fall, those employment opportunities are gone.

What’s ironic about the focus over these jobs numbers is that job creation is a secondary effect of a stimulus bill that is first helps state governments and spurs consumer spending. If the Obama administration and Congress had wanted to, they could have created a bill full of cheap direct job creation programs like summer youth jobs. And they could be having press conferences and hearings now about all the jobs created.

Instead, they decided that direct job creation could be overbearing or politically bad or something and that a focus on overall economic growth (and administration priorities like education reform and renewable energy research) was more important. If Congress now wants more jobs, they should do more than just Obama administration oversight and actually pass legislation that directly spurs job growth.

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