Vice President Joe Biden at noon will be announcing a new report showing the $787 billion economic stimulus plan so far has “created or saved” at least 1 million jobs.
He will be joined by California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger (R) and Maryland Gov. Martin O’Malley (D).
Administration officials tell TPMDC the new report will credit the Recovery Act with directly creating or saving about 650,000 jobs from its February start through Sept. 30.
The new report, to be posted in full here today, will detail about half the spending so far. The figures “confirm government and private forecaster’s estimates that overall Recovery Act spending has created and saved at least 1 million jobs,” officials said.
Obama aides tout this as history making since it will offer for the first time ever “more information about the Recovery Act at work than with any previous government program.”
These reports are focused on education funding, highway repairs and construction projects reported by officials in state governments.
They say the data will show for each project who received the funds, when they received them, how they began to spend them and the jobs they have supported so far. It will be searchable by state, ZIP cod or Congressional district.
The administration says “analysis by both the Council of Economic Advisers and a wide range of private and public-sector forecasters indicates the Recovery Act contributed between 3 and 4 percentage points to real GDP growth in the third quarter, suggesting that in the absence of the Recovery Act, real GDP would have risen little, if at all, this past quarter.”
