The White House has just issued a new state-by-state estimate on the number of jobs that will be saved or created over the next two years under the $789.5 billion economic stimulus package now nearing final approval in Congress.

The figure for Maryland is 66,000, which represents a slight decline from an earlier administration estimate. That figure, based on the House stimulus bill, which also had a higher price tag than the final package, was 70,000 jobs.

These figures are extremely rough estimates, however. The actual impact on Maryland employment could well be higher, since overall federal spending ripples out from the District of Columbia and is more concentrated in the surrounding region than in the rest of the country.

According to the White House, the estimates were derived from an analysis of the overall employment impact of the stimulus package, conducted by Christina Romer, Chair of the Council of Economic Advisers, and Jared Bernstein, Chief Economist for the Vice President.

They came up with a figure of 3.5 million jobs that would be created or saved over the next two years. Of course, how one defines a "saved" job is open to wide interpretation, since it basically means a job that would have been cut and now would be preserved.

The White House then took those numbers and divided them up, using detailed estimates of the working age population, employment, and industrial composition of each state.

But the construction projects in the stimulus package, for example, are not spread evenly around the country. And other stimulative aspects of the plan may also disproportionately help Maryland.

As Sen. Barbara A. Mikulski remarked this week at a meeting between the state's congressional delegation and Gov. Martin O'Malley and his staff: "Every time the federal government spends a dollar, a lot of it is being administered in Maryland."