Hartzler misses forest in critique of stimulus job creation

Congressional candidate Vicky Hartzler (R) showed a level of ignorance Thursday with comments criticizing federal stimulus jobs reporting.

Hartzler issued a press release that hops on a conservative bandwagon aimed at criticizing reported job estimates in misidentified congressional districts. Hartzler immediately jumps to the conclusion that government can't do anything right.

"What this tells us above all is that it's time to change from the failed policies of big spending, borrowing and debt favored by Rep. Skelton," Hartzler said in the press release.

But the jobs Hartzler referenced are also geocoded by zip code, for which no broad errors have been identified. Apparently people can identify where they work, which is more than can be said for identifying their political representatives.

More importantly, the misidentification of congressional districts is a problem with recipients reporting data, not with the federal bureaucracy overseeing reporting.

Sec. 1512 of the American Reinvestment and Recovery Act (P.L. 111-5) requires recipients of federal stimulus funds to report data quarterly to federal agencies. According to the White House Recovery Board, recipients are ultimately responsible for the data, not federal agencies. Although federal agencies scoured through the data to identify mistakes prior to its public release, even the White House acknowledged minor errors would remain.

Does that mean taxpayer funds were flagrantly wasted? Not at all, says Vice President Joe Biden (D).

"Every single solitary penny that got sent out there to a state, a construction company, a nonprofit had to be accounted for," Biden told Daily Show host Jon Stewart earlier this week. "And it all got put on Recovery.gov. What happened was, out of 130,000 people reporting in what they did with the money...There was bad civics classes for those [who misreported districts.] They had to fill out a form, what district are you in, and there was no such district."

So what does it mean that recipients are misidentifying congressional districts? It does not mean the jobs are fake or the reports are inherently flawed, but it does show a level of political ignorance among Americans. And with Congress' approval rating of 27 percent, it's no wonder Americans are tuning out what's happening in Congress.

Perhaps that's the same ignorance Hartzler and others have expressed in misidentifying the owners of the data being criticized.

As for Hartzler's perpetuation of the notion that jobs are being misreported, we say show us. There would be nothing better for our readership than some hard proof of government waste. Show us the cases where folks misidentified their city.

Yes Congressional districts might be off a bit here and there, but where's the meat to show government waste? Where is the example of 50 jobs created in a zip code with 10 people?

So far, we haven't found problems of significant note either.

Our advice to Hartzler: move away from the talking points that lead you to focus on the trees instead of the forest. There are much bigger problems to talk about in the 2010 campaign. For starters, perhaps you could focus on reducing voters' ignorance.

And for the record, the mistakes on jobs reporting go both ways. A number of projects have been identified where recipients discussed new jobs in the summaries but didn't add the totals in the jobs created field.

According to Government Executive's analysis: "Repeatedly, recipients of grants and contracts discussed jobs created or saved in the narrative column but failed to include them in the total."

Hartlzer is campaigning for the Republican nomination in Missouri's 4th Congressional District (not to be confused with the nonexistent 14th district). Three other Republicans are also vying for the nomination. The winner of the primary will face 16-term Congressman Ike Skelton (D).

Related Links:
Hartzler's Press Release (PDF)
Recovery.gov

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