Stimulus construction boost will be benefit for south USA.

Obama has set a goal of creating or saving 3.5 million jobs by the end of next year.Federal contractors reported creating or saving more than 30,000 jobs in the first months of President Barack Obama's stimulus program, with construction jobs leading the way and states in the South and Southwest seeing the biggest increase, according to data released last week by a government oversight board.The numbers, based on jobs linked to less than $16 billion in federal contracts, represent just a sliver of the $787 billion stimulus package. But they offer the first hard data on the early effects of the program. Until now, the White House has relied on economic models to argue that the program created jobs and eased the recession. Critics point to rising unemployment to argue it wasn't worth the cost. The construction industry reported the strongest job numbers, accounting for about a third of the jobs thanks to construction contracts to repair military bases. Colorado posted the largest increase of any state, reporting more than 4,700 jobs, largely thanks to a contract to set up a call center to field questions about the change to digital cable. House Minority Leader John Boehner said the numbers don't change the fact that unemployment has climbed higher than the White House ever expected. Since signing the stimulus in February, Obama has watched the economy shed millions of jobs as unemployment climbed higher than his economists predicted. The White House says things would have been far worse without the stimulus. Jared Bernstein, the chief economic adviser to Vice President Joe Biden, said it was too early to draw conclusions from the data "but the early indications are quite positive." In the short term, the most significant thing about the job numbers may be that they exist at all. The government has never before attempted to track the effects, in real time, of a huge government program. The data released by the independent Recovery Accountability and Transparency Board allow taxpayers to see not just where their money is going, but what the government is getting in return and how many people are on the job.