796 Stimulus Jobs

Counting jobs is harder than you might think. If a person is hired for three months, is that a job? If someone else works longer but only part time, when do you call that a job? The answer from Washington is you add up all the hours worked during a certain period. Then you divide by however many hours you consider to be full time.

For New Hampshire, the result is 796.2. That’s how many jobs measured in full time equivalents were paid for with stimulus dollars as of the end of June. Just about all of them, 700, are government workers who otherwise would have been laid off. Bud Fitch, Director of the office of economic stimulus, presented the figures to the governor and executive council. If anyone was expecting a robust jobs report, Fitch was blunt but he highlighted the limitations of this first assessment.

FITCH: The other numbers are quite low. If you look through, the highest number being 75.7, the transportation. But bear in mind, this is a statistic from June and a lot of programs are just getting up and going in July and August and we give you numbers going forward this will increase.

Fitch also noted that one of the biggest bolts of federal money, what will ultimately be hundreds of millions of dollars for Medicaid, isn’t included in this tally at all. He had one other word of caution. So far, the state has approved contracts and grants worth more than 250 million dollars.

FITCH: It’s important not to confuse that number with how much money we’ve spent to date.

Fitch doesn’t know how many dollars have gone out the door as paychecks and purchases but he does know it is a small fraction of how much will be spent in the months to come.

If this first official count of stimulus jobs lacked certain details, that didn’t bother Governor John Lynch.

LYNCH: I see over and over again jobs which are being created as a result of federal stimulus money. I toured the airport access road and that’s a project that’s being accelerated by a couple of years because of federal economic stimulus money providing, creating, retaining hundreds of jobs. We’re seeing that with weatherization programs which occur throughout New Hampshire. So I think the money is being used for the purpose for which it was intended.

Lynch says this assessment confirms the early impact of the stimulus. Consulting economist Brian Gottlob is not so sure. Gottlob zeros in on the 700 government jobs that were saved. He argues that since most of that money went to cover the state’s share of education funding, it really went to pay teachers and staff in local schools.

GOTTLOB: I’m a little bit skeptical that we have actually seen a loss of 700 employees in school districts. Perhaps we would have seen some losses. But I’m not really sure we have ever had or are likely to have large scale layoffs in public education. And that’s really where that money has gone to.

Gottlob says, one way or another, most of the money for local schools would have been found. He doesn’t fault the jobs report. He says it uses the best approach available at the moment. Gottlob says to have an accurate count, you need to track exactly when the federal dollars were spent and then look at the overall employment in the specific industries where the dollars went.

GOTTLOB: But that won’t happen for a while and it will likely happen well after most of the money has been spent.

Counting jobs aside, the real question is, will the stimulus money spur economic activity. Gottlob says it pretty much has to. He estimates that at the end of the day, the state will see nearly a billion dollars in additional money flowing through. He says that will have a real impact on the economy.

For NHPR News, I’m Jon Greenberg.