The White House’s stimulus program is a joke. Indeed, the Obama administration would be better served if it handed out money on the side of the street, than it is by its current job creation program. Consider the current numbers:

Reports to be released Friday on the government Web site Recovery.gov are expected to show that the $150 billion in grants and loans made so far under the economic stimulus package have created or saved about 650,000 jobs, White House officials said Friday morning.

Now, some simple math:

Cost: $150,000,000,000

“Created or saved” jobs: 650,000

Cost per “created or saved” job = $230,769.23

And the White House call this a success?

Yes, yes it does. Joe the-vice-president Biden’s chief economist, Jared Bernstein, says:

“Good news, folks…But as we applaud these unprecedented efforts in transparency and this new confirmation that the Recovery Act is successfully creating jobs across America, we are also acutely aware that even the highest estimates of jobs created or saved by the Act only partially offset the extent of job losses since the recession took hold last year. For this reason, we plan to continue to squeeze every job out of every dollar left to spend in the Recovery Act, and to do so with the same level of transparency achieved thus far.”

Here, folks, is the Obama administration squeezing good news out of bad news. But transparency reigns supreme: the economic news still looks bad.