If you haven’t checked it out, you should watch Anthony Greco’s CJTV exclusive on the phoney-baloney numbers used by the state Department of Transportation to justify begging for federal high-speed rail dollars.
Short version: As a condition of getting stimulus money from D.C., the Obama administration required states to use the term “job-years” to describe the economic impact of the spending. Under this terminology, which is not recognized by the professional number-crunchers at the Bureau of Labor Statistics, if one employee stays at the same job for four years, the state gets credit for “creating” four job-years. 
That’s how Gov. Bev Perdue and DOT Secretary Gene Conti can claim that federal high-speed rail money would create nearly 4,800 job-years when in fact only about 1,200 people would be employed. The page of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act document with the relevant data is attached. Click on it and look at the third chart from the top.
This bogus methodology could be twisted to satisfy any agenda. Instead of using years, why not months, weeks, or days? Assuming a 250-day working year, the Perdue administration could claim 1.2 million job-days, or nearly 10 million job-hours! Stay tuned. This new math could have limitless applications.
