I think it's less lying and more having no incentive to inform people as to what it actually means.

I agree that calling them "job-years" would clear it up but I think politicians would get a lot more pushback against these deals if people knew. So they don't. For a long time I wondered what these numbers meant, and sometime in my 30s I did some looking into it.

Now whenever one of these deals comes up I like to pop in a little comment to help inform people.