Sponsored Links
The White House said Monday that the $787 billion economic stimulus and recovery bill had saved or created 250,000 teaching and education jobs since it was passed.
The report, an analysis of data reported from around the country, is a combination of new programs created with the federal funds as well as jobs saved when federal funds were used to plug state budget shortfalls with education assistance, said presidential economist Jared Bernstein.
The education funds and state aid spent through the end of the third quarter that resulted in the jobs claim marks $150 billion of the $276 billion in the stimulus bill, formally known as the Recovery Act.
"These are direct jobs. Direct jobs are jobs that are directly created and funded through spending in the Recovery Act -- in this case, for example, think about a job of an educator saved because a state budget would have had to undergo cuts that would have enforced a layoff," he said. "Direct jobs are only part of the story."
He added, "Indirect jobs occur when that teacher who otherwise would have been laid off goes shopping and is able to spend income earnings that she otherwise wouldn't have had. That creates more economic activity."
Also, Bernstein noted that the effects of the program may have spread even further, if less deeply in some cases because of the way states report their job figures. Two part time jobs are reported as a single "full time equivalent" employee. He added that there was also no way to determine the proportion of jobs saved compared to new jobs created.
Melody Barnes, the Director of the White House Domestic Policy Council, said that the the Recovery Act restored about 9 percent of the K through 12 education funding in four states, California, Alabama, Indiana, and Oregon. In another three, Florida, Wisconsin, and South Carolina it restored 12 percent while restoring in Illinois.
"We've been able to save about 4,000 jobs in New York City, for example; 242 jobs were saved in Indianapolis," she said. "About 1,944 jobs were saved in Miami-Dade County, Florida; and 7 percent of the teaching staff in Scotts Bluff, Nebraska."
She added, "We were able to avert massive class expansion, class size expansion . and also to provide needed services when it comes to math and literacy in those instances."
Bernstein also noted that although the figures are preliminary he said the government was very confident that they would hold up through the final audits.
However he also acknowledged that there is much yet to be done in terms of restoring the economy.
"In an economy with over 15 million people unemployed, there's a lot of folks out there that are facing deep economic struggles," he said. "Many of our economic actions, our interventions, whether it's housing, financial markets, certainly the Recovery Act as we're talking about today, along with actions of the Fed, have certainly helped to pull the economy back from the brink."
He added, "But until we start bringing down the unemployment rate, until we start chipping away at those millions of unemployed people, until we start providing them with the jobs, the wages, the incomes, the hope, the opportunity . our work is far from done."
0 komentar:
Post a Comment