This post was published to Laxdesign's Blog at 2:18:05 PM 11/19/2009

11/17/2009 Obama’s Stimulus Package Impact on

the Southern Tier of NY
This is my first attempt at writing a blog, so please bear with me. The theme
of the discussion - What effect does the ‘stimulus package’ have on New
York State, if any? Given the dismal unemployment numbers, are long term
permanent jobs being created by the stimulus package or are they
temporary and fleeting. Based on the evidence I will provide, it appears that
the ‘job creation’ maybe more a myth than a fact. Before I present the
evidence that supports my conclusion, I think a moment should be taken to
explain the source of the data. In the Albany Times Union, a story reported
that over 40,600 jobs have been created so far through $2.5B in federal
stimulus spending in New York. The figure 40,600 then became the focal
point of the research. Did a database exist that provides a granular view as
to how this number was derived? Can one extract data from the
Recovery.gov website and make sense of it? You can but the process is a bit
convoluted. With transparency comes confusion.

I downloaded data at the detail level from this site, and began trying to
decipher what was contained within the downloaded information. I was
curious to see the types of jobs being created and at what cost to the
taxpayer. Once the data was extracted how close could I come to the
40,600 number? As it turns out, I was never able to quite achieve ‘that
number’ but was able to determine that 40,304 jobs had been created based
on the extraction. So I am three hundred jobs short of the magical 40,600
number, but my number should provide a decent statistical data point. And
who knows which numbers are correct, for the Recovery.gov site is riddled
with errors? Although the glandular data is voluminous in nature and
contains numerous fields such as award amount, award description, project
description, congressional district, long zip code and jobs created to name a
few, no county data was listed. Given I was interested in specifically seeing
how many jobs had been created in Tioga County or Broome County, I
decided to create a zip code, post office, county New York State database.
Once created a merging the two files based on zip codes seemed a logical
solution to my problem.

Errors in Reovery.gov

Let’s for one moment then examine that Recovery.gov data and see some of
the problems. On the Recovery.gov site, it is possible to easily generate a
listing of jobs saved by zip code in New York State. The site does a
wonderful job of presenting this data, yet it is incorrect. Given that I had a
zip code, county database, it is a simple process to create a report that
summarizes jobs not based on zip codes (does any know every zip code in
NYS) but on county. Seems straight forward enough; however 9 zip codes
listed in the report generated by Recovery.gov do not exist within NYS. Six
of those zip codes do not exist period, and the remaining 3 belong to
California, Wyoming and Nevada. So who is to say what the real number of
jobs saved or created really is.
Bad zip
ID codes jobs amount Location
153 89520 0 $6,198,444.00 Reno, Nevada
183 11122 0 $5,511,807.00 No such zip code
543 14104 0 $980,000.00 No such zip code
737 14023 2 $475,062.00 No such zip code
Sleepy Hollow,
783 82718 2 $345,069.00 Wyoming
825 10665 0 $230,000.00 No such zip code
870 95014 0 $134,452.00 Cupertino, Ca.
904 10741 0 $67,604.00 No such zip code
927 18189 8 $47,456.00 No such zip code
$13,989,894.0
Bad Data Totals 12 0

In a recent TV appearance on the O’Reilly Factor, John Stossel seemed to

suggest that a government conspiracy to inflate the ‘saved jobs’ numbers
was in the making based on his observations. Based on his analysis,
several congressional districts credited with job saved were fictions or made
up. The Obama run government was ‘cooking the books’, and maybe
purposely inflating the numbers to make their policies look good. I am not
quite so cynical, given that the duty of reporting this data is not a
government responsibility; this task has been subcontracted to an outside
party. Software controls have not been put in place to catch the typo errors
of the personnel inputting the data. One can only imagine the sheer
numbers of congressional districts and zip codes listed in this massive
database.

Southern Tier Jobs?

Even if the data is not as pure as the driven snow, examining data related to
the Southern Tier should give the reader some idea of the quality of the jobs
produced/saved. Again I must fall on my sword as the jobs created/saved
based on the extracted data in Broome County were 67 not the 82
advertised on Recovery.gov. However, the 67 number should provide, at the
very least, an overview of the type of jobs being developed. Looking at the
data is an exercise in and of itself, but I will try to present the data in a
summarized fashion based on project name:
 Broome County Stimulus Job Creation with Project

Top Level Project Name

COLA

FY 2009 AARA COLA/QI

Head Start

Financial Aid

Federal Work Study

Federal Work-Study

Homelessness Prevention and Rapid Re-Housing Program

SEPP HOUSING DEVELOPMENT FUND CORPORATION

Infrastructur
e

CDBG-R Street Reconstruction

CDBG-Recovery Act

(blank)

Research

ARRA: Making Superior Alumina Thin Films Via Ozone Oxidation of Aluminum: Correlation Between Oxid
Nanoscale Atomic Sstructure in Amorphous Oxide Films

ARRA: Ontogenetic changes in ethanol's motivational properties:Involvement of kapp

ARRA: Pathways to Depression in Children of Depressed Mothers

ARRA: Points of Integral Models of Shimura Varieties of Hodege Type and the Tate Langlands-Rapoport

ARRA:Career:Investigations into Nonlinear Phenomena in Electrostatic MEMS and their Potential for Sm

ARRA:Retrospective in vivo modeling of P. falciparum chloroquine resistance evolution

ARRA:Supplement for Undergraduate Support Summer 2009 and Summer 2010-Development of a minia
directional microphone diaphragm for hearing aids.

STTR Phase I: Multifunctional Magnetic Core-Shell Nanoparticles

Grand Total

At least the bulk of the jobs created were street reconstruction

oriented. The bulk of the created/saved jobs went to the task of repaving
Robinson Street in Binghamton and road reconstruction in Endwell. Granted
the monies were used for infrastructure repairs in the Southern Tier (a good
thing), but were the jobs created temporary or long lasting. In my opinion,
they were temporary at best. Will these jobs bring long lasting relief to the
unemployment situation, provide much needed tax revenue to support the
Broome County, I think not. As far as the expenditures on research, one can
only guess what the outcome might be. Somebody needed monies for some
pet projects, and the stimulus package was ripe for the taking. Will these
jobs in anyway replace what the region’s lost jobs at Lockheed, not by any
stretch of the imagination. Sixty seven or eighty two is certainly not a
replacement for the 600 jobs loss in Owego.

Conclusion:
At least at this juncture, stimulus job creation appears to be more of a myth
than a fact. Hopefully as time evolves, tax payer dollars will not be wasted
and real long lasting jobs will be created. The government must also to a
better job of scrubbing the data, before making it open to the general public.
As it now stands no one knows if any of the numbers are correct. This
inaccuracy only increases the tax payer’s frustrations and increases the
distrust of any government run bureaucratic process.