Audit on the Stimulus: Has It Really Created or Saved 640,000 Jobs?

This is a rush transcript from "On the Record," November 5, 2009. This copy may not be in its final form and may be updated.

GRETA VAN SUSTEREN, FOX NEWS HOST: Mark Twain is quoted as saying there are three kind of lies, lies, damned lies, and statistics. We sure have statistics from our government. Where do they get them and should you believe them or not?

Right now according to Recovery.gov, more than 640,000 jobs have been created or saved by the $787 billion-dollar stimulus package. Do you trust those numbers or are you sort in the Mark Twain school of thought when it comes to statistics.

Joining us is Steve Moore, senior economics writer for the "Wall Street Journal" editorial page. All right, Steve, do you trust the numbers?

STEVE MOORE, "WALL STREET JOURNAL": Well, Greta, I will answer that question in a second, but I wanted to tell you something, the latest bullet on that health care bill you were talking about. This is something you fumed about over the last few months.

It now appears, Greta, the bill as it will be voted on will not be posted on the Internet 72 hours before the vote, which means that most the members with will not have read it and the American people will not have at least 72 hours to read the bill to see what they're voting on.

We're talking about one of the most important pieces of legislation in American mystery. It's an outrage.

VAN SUSTEREN: And are you surprised? Are you the least bit surprised?

MOORE: I'm shocked. You know what, Greta, I am surprised because of the brazenness of this and the arrogance of Speaker Pelosi to say we're not going to let the American people see the bill. I am shocked by it.

VAN SUSTEREN: Steve -- wait a second, Steve -- every single American out there who is outraged at this could get on the phone, could get on the Internet and start pounding congressman, congresswomen and senators right now.

So in some ways I sort of throw my hands up. Of course they should put it up there and let the American people see it. But if the American people want to see it, they are in the driver's seat and they could demand that.

MOORE: I think that's one reason maybe we had 50,000 people on the mall today.

On this issue of the jobs bill, it really is interesting, isn't it, that if you look at all these reports that coming out right now, and there are numerous of them from around the states, I don't know if I'd use the word "lie," but there is certainly a deception that is going on here which this bill.

And what we found for example is that in some cases there was a two- thirds overstatement of the number of jobs that were created. As an example, Greta, when anyone got a raise with this money, they called it a job saved.

There was an article in today's "Milwaukee Journal Sentinel," your old home newspaper. It found that there were vast amount of overstatements of jobs created in Wisconsin. In one case they put extra zero. They said 500 jobs had been created when only 50 had.

They said inadvertent error, and I'm not so sure it was inadvertent.

VAN SUSTEREN: I'm not -- we have so many quality controls you would think on these numbers. I'm not going to be as nice as you are and say tonight -- maybe it because it's on the heels of hearing these 12 people gunned down in Fort Hood, but using nice words like "deception" instead of "lie," I will go with lie tonight, because there are people out there who want jobs who want to work, and there is no reason why we should play this game with the numbers and fool around with it and say -- even be deceitful about saying jobs are, quote, "saved" when there is no way how to figure out how jobs are saved. That's almost impossible. That's to the point of absurdity.

MOORE: And the reason that I think that you're probably right, that there is a systematic deceit here is that there is a systematic over counting.

And here is the problem. The people being asked to count the number of jobs that were created are the very people who got the money. So of course they have an incentive to create all these jobs. Give us more money and we'll create more jobs.

So there hasn't been good audit of this system. You know the new unemployment rates are coming out tomorrow. A lot of people expect more jobs lost. There is just no evidence that the stimulus bill is creating jobs for America. It's been, in my opinion, a $200 billion waste of money.

VAN SUSTEREN: Steve, thank you.

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