RICHARD ECKSTROM I recently attended the groundbreaking for the new Boeing facility in the Lowcountry, and as I reflected on this historic moment I thought about the stark difference in the way the federal government approaches job creation and the way S.C. leaders landed Boeing. In adopting the “stimulus,” Washington tried to stimulate economic growth by embarking on recordshattering government spending, redistributing resources from the private sector to the public or government sector, and dramatically increasing the size and scope of government. By contrast, South Carolina leaders successfully recruited Boeing by reducing government obstacles — by cutting red tape, unnecessary regulations, and taxes, and letting free markets work — inducing a major private sector employer to make the decision in its best interest, creating thousands of new jobs for South Carolina in the process.

Two weeks earlier I had been in Washington DC to meet with White House and federal agency officials about the Stimulus Act and to discuss whether the Stimulus has actually created jobs as promised. I had previously explained my feelings on the stimulus: We’re spending money we don’t have, and burying our children and grandchildren under mountains of debt, all under the pretense of “economic recovery.” I’ve worried the new spending won’t do much to create jobs, and that it might actually hinder, rather than help, the normal process of recovery.

According to the White House, the stimulus “saved or created” more than 600,000 jobs nationwide, and more than 8,000 of those were in South Carolina. But those claims are highly questionable, and certainly don’t square with the fact that the state and national unemployment rates have risen dramatically since the stimulus was passed nine months ago.

During my recent meeting, which was arranged by the National Governor’s Association and attended by each state’s stimulus oversight coordinator, I expressed concerns about the way federal officials are telling states to count stimulus jobs. In my view, the method currently used results in an artificially high job count.

Americans deserve an honest assessment of the impact the $787 billion stimulus has had on employment, but the federal government’s current method of calculating the number of stimulus-related jobs is badly flawed. For instance, rather than to simply count new jobs created, the federal government has coined the term “jobs saved or created” — which means guessing the number of jobs that would have been lost had the stimulus not been passed. Many of those guesses have been exaggerated. And there have been numerous media reports across the country of some stimulus money being used only to give raises, and then (wink, wink) count those raises as “jobs saved.”

At the end of our meeting, the National Governor’s Association set up a special task force to study changing the way jobs are counted, and I was appointed to the task force. We’ve already met twice by conference call, and I’ve continued to insist that the method for counting new jobs should be simple, honest, realistic, verifiable, and — above all — transparent. Whether or not one agrees with the stimulus legislation, everyone should be able to agree that we need an honest, accurate measure of its impact.