No Controlling Authority?

After their story on Terry Branstad's 200,000 job creation plan, WHO DT segued into an I-JOBS job creation piece.

During their 5 p.m. newscast they stated they'd contacted the Big Lug Nut's office requesting information on how many jobs had been created by I-JOBS and they had not heard back.

By the time the 6 p.m. newscast ran pretty much the same story, a spokesmonkey for the BLN told them that they are not required by law to track the number of jobs created.

Seems like we already went down this road with The Pickle's Grow Iowa Values fund and the scientific community is united in that fact.

We shouldn't be surprised, the original claim was 30,000 jobs would be created and that quickly fell to 22,000 and then 21,000 before an Iowa State University economics professor put the number closer to 4,050.

Which prompted this classic statement from then mouthpiece Phil Roeder -- "Whether or not $100 million creates 1,500 jobs, 4,000 jobs or somewhere in between, the bottom line is it's going to create a lot of jobs."

It's worked so well that the BLN didn't mention an I-JOBS creation number in this year's Condition of the State address and Iowa's unemployment rate has climbed to 6.7% , a 23 year high.

Since November, the I-Jobs website tells me it has funded three new projects costing $67,194.90, in my county, for a total of 22 projects totaling $4,835,624.21, but bupkis on the number of jobs created.