We want to believe the government's claims that President Barack Obama's economic stimulus plan has helped to create or save nearly 650,000 jobs.

But can you blame us if we're skeptical?

Last week, the Obama administration issued its latest report tracking how federal stimulus money had either helped put Americans back to work or saved their jobs. Across the nation, the administration said, 640,329 jobs had been created or saved. In Oregon, the number listed was 9,653.

There's a catch: Friday's report followed the administration's admission earlier in the week that previous counts of jobs credited to the stimulus had been faulty. A review by the Associated Press found the government's earlier reports overstated, by the thousands, the number of jobs saved or created.

The White House promised that the errors found by the AP would be corrected. However, the stimulus job count reported Friday still included mistakes such as the ones discovered in the AP's sampling of government contracts.

Among the AP's discoveries last week: Some agencies that received stimulus money reported saving jobs, although they actually used the money for employee pay raises.

And the AP reported that the data released Friday appeared to include at least dozens of entries in which contractors listed the same number of jobs created or saved on different projects, which suggested double- or triple-counting of the same workers used on all projects.

All this comes in the wake of the report a few months ago that earlier estimates from the state about jobs created by legislative action dramatically overstated the length of those jobs.

There's no doubt that government spending has helped to preserve or create jobs. But it's also undoubtedly true that this business of estimating the actual number of jobs saved or created is, at best, inexact.

Nevertheless, the stakes surrounding last week's report are high: Even though the economy is finally showing signs of recovery, unemployment rates are staying high - and economists continue to talk about a "jobless recovery." Americans without jobs aren't likely to feel that they're part of any recovery - and that frustration could boil over in next year's elections.

No wonder there's temptation to cook job-creation numbers, on both sides of the aisle.

And that's why skepticism is warranted in reviewing these job creation numbers. Our advice: Take these claims with a grain of salt - and with an eye on a relatively straightforward statistic, the unemployment rates for both Oregon and the United States. When those numbers start to retreat, that's when the recovery begins in earnest.