Remember the brouhaha about the estimated 3.5 million jobs that were going to be “created or saved” by the stimulus bill?
Since that PR campaign landed with a thud, the Obama folks have arrived at another way to sell the stimulus: Stop pretending to count those phantom jobs.
From The New York Times:

From February to September, the administration had said, more than 640,000 jobs were saved or created. But in the final quarter of 2009, the administration no longer asked recipients whether all of those jobs were actually created or saved by the stimulus money or whether some of those jobs might have existed without the stimulus money.


Instead, it now simply counts all existing jobs paid for with stimulus money as saved jobs, whether or not they would have been lost without the money.

The new, more expansive definition will make it more difficult to isolate the effects of the stimulus law … .

Carolina Journal‘s Sara Burrows found federal stimulus dollars that were sent to phantom ZIP codes in North Carolina here and here. To its credit, I suppose, the administration claimed this $2.5 million created only 0.5 jobs.