This is pretty rich. Ben Smith finds some minor discrepancies in job creation estimates from the stimulus package, and Rep. Cantor, um, pounces:
A White House estimate of the number of jobs stimulus legislation will create includes some sharp discrepancies between state and local jobs claims.
Those differences — which the document suggests are large rounding errors — was spotted by the office of House Minority Whip Eric Cantor, which assembled the chart above. It comes as the White House is seeking to define the stimulus package as a jobs bill, and to focus locally on the jobs it will create.
The White House document (.doc) projects job creation both by state and by congressional district.
“State totals may not sum due to rounding,” the chart says at the bottom, though in some cases — most dramatically, understandably, in small states — the rounding error represents a large share of the projected jobs. In small states with just one congressional district, which represents the whole state, the difference is particularly striking, presumably a result of different methods of calculating the job figures for the same set of residents.
***A spokesman for Cantor, Brad Dayspring, emails, “I don’t think that the 4600 people in Nevada or 1900 people in Wyoming – not to mention thousands of other Americans – will understand not getting a job due to a ’rounding error.'”
You are probably right, but considering your boss wants to vote against the package, any job creation is greater than the number you intend to create. Unless, of course, there is a Republican alternate math that goes along with their alternate reality, in which zero is greater than 4600. Coming from the party that argued that the Iraq war will pay for itself, this is very possible.