Did Tim Geithner Use Turbo Tax to Determine the Detroit Employment Rate?

The Obama administration has been pushing hard recently to receive the American public’s approval of the bailouts given to America’s top automakers. Started by the preceding White house administration, these bailouts have proved to be a failure in the current administration’s policy where taxpayers once again have to pick up the tab. Taxes 2010 accounted for a majority of what the last two White House administrations paid the top automakers in Detroit to increase jobs and spurt economic growth.

Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner recently claimed that the bailout led to an increase in jobs in the city of Detroit. When analyzing the unemployment figures for Detroit, the numbers show that since Obama took office the unemployment rate in Detroit has only fallen by one percentage point. This shows that Geithner’s claims sound a bit deceptive. When looking at the number of jobs in metropolitan Detroit, there were 713,390 jobs in Detroit when President Obama took office. As of April 2011, the figures state that there are 695,200 Detroit jobs. This is a decrease in jobs by 18,000. The results are the same for the wider Detroit area. There were 1.7822 million jobs in 2009. As of April 2011 there are 1.7398 million jobs in Detroit. This is a decrease of 43,000 jobs. If a comparison is done for statewide jobs then the results also show a decline.  Geithner previously claimed that TurboTax lead to his mis-filing of tax credits, therefore pundits are make  a similar joke of this accounting again.

What caused the jobless rate to fall so sharply? To reflect the nationwide trend, people have been removed from the Detroit workforce in such large numbers while at the same time the number of real jobs has decreased as well. Geithner deceptively cast the auto bailout in terms of jobs returning to Detroit. The actual numbers reflect differently in Detroit as well as the rest of the USA.