What Is Obama Trying To Pull Over Our Eyes This Time

Did you hear the big news today?

White House: 650,000 jobs created or saved under President Barack Obama's economic stimulus plan.

As is in my nature I wanted to know a little bit more about how this number was figured and how is that possible with such high unemployment. So I clicked over to RECOVERY.gov which happens to be the US government's official website that reports all data related to the Recovery Act.

It should be noted that on the home page as of October 30th that 640,239 jobs have been created/saved as reported by companies that received money from the Recovery Act.

It did take me a little while to digest the information and where to find the actual numbers that were driving the headline numbers. For those who want to see how many jobs were created or saved in your state, you are in for a surprise. I know that I was when I saw them for my home state of Indiana.

According to the government website, Indiana ranked 11th in the most jobs created with a total number of 18,876. In order to create/save this number of jobs it also required $848,420,000.

This means it would have cost $44,947.02 to create/save a job within Indiana.

If these numbers were accurate, it seems like a reasonable number. There is the catch. The numbers have to be accurate.

When I checked my state unemployment numbers, they told a complete contrarian story. Here are the real employment numbers from the state of Indiana: 271,000 jobs lost from January 1, 2009 through September 30, 2009. Every sector in the state of Indiana with the exception of government, which includes public schools and hospitals, lost jobs. And the government jobs created were only 2,400 for the first 9 months of 2009.

I have to believe the numbers that came from the Indiana state employment office because it correlates to the nature of the home loan inquiries to my mortgage planning office in Northwest Indiana this year. As I scratch my head in disbelief, What Is Obama Trying To Pull Over Our Eyes This Time?