When Does A Lie Become A Truth?

Did you know that there are several ways to count up how many people get employed for a proposed project? Pretty much any project where it's likely to get quoted by politicians? Well there are. Maybe more than a couple, but here are two. the first way is when a politician, especially during an election campaign. Or even a nominating campaign. You guessed it. A politician will take information about a company who wants to build or wants a tax break or whatever, the politician will take a suggested number of new jobs of, oh lets say 100, just for the sake of conversation. The politician will them claim that there will be 1800 new jobs created. There are two reasons for this practice. First is to make that politician look good, the second is to make the opponent look bad. What did you expect? How can you make the opponent look bad? Just claim the opponent is against it. He might be the one that actually talked the company into moving here, but if you shout it loud enough and often enough, it becomes the truth. Understand that both parties take part in this process, although one party is a little better at it than the other. There is another way for jobs numbers to get inflated. In this approach,  an independent company looks at the new 100 job industry and says, if one worker works two years, that's two worker years. So if they believe the company will stay here for eighteen years and keeps it's workforce at 100, that would be 1800 worker years. Back to example one. The politician only hears 1800, not 1800 worker years. Even if it's clearly explained to the politician. What about a temporary jobs project? Let's take the Keystone XL oil pipeline from Canada to Texas. In this one you can see both examples used. Claims from 20,000 to over 100,000 jobs are being claimed by politicians, but the fact is only between 5000 and 6000 temporary jobs will be created and about 50 permanent jobs expected. The company that made the projections on jobs used the worker year plan and came up with 13000 jobs. The State Department's office expects about 5000 or 6000 temp jobs, but as I said, politicians are making all sorts of claims. Why now? The politicians want others to look bad. Why? Because we're approaching an election year. Just remember, just because they'll shout it loudly and often, doesn't make it so.