ABC: $160,000 Per Stimulus Job? White House Calls That ‘Calculator Abuse’
October 30th, 2009
You have to love it when even the mainstream media starts calling out the White House on its taxpayer money wasting stimulus plan. Following on the numerous errors in jobs counting that have come out in recent days, it was announced that “640,329 jobs have been created or saved” due to the stimulus fund.
As ABC News’ Jake Tapper points out, those numbers mean that at a total cost of $159 billion, the stimulus cost YOU, the American taxpayer, $160,000 per job. Quite the bargain, eh? Of course it also is important to remember that the aspect of “saved” jobs is something invented by the Obama Admninistration and is some fantasy number that has no statistic to back it up and cannot be quantified.
What a joke. Here are some excerpts from the story:
Posting its results late this afternoon at Recovery.gov, the White House claimed 640,329 jobs have been created or saved because of the $159 billion in stimulus funds allocated as of Sept. 30.
Officials acknowledged the numbers were not exact, saying that states and localities that reported the numbers have made mistakes.
In recent days, the Recovery Act board has been reviewing all the numbers, with many inaccurate ones having been posted. California’s San Joaquin Regional Rail Commission received $5 million in stimulus funds to hire workers to build addition train track for the Union Pacific Railroad in an economically tarnished spot of the Golden State.
Brian Schmidt, director of planning and programming for the commission said that his staff originally reported to the Obama administration that the stimulus money saved 250 jobs. Then, realizing they had mistakenly double credited, they later changed that to 125 jobs. Tuesday, they updated it again to 74 jobs.
….
White House officials heralded the unparalleled transparency in reporting job numbers to the public, but acknowledged there is no consistent standard across states or localities, or among federal agencies giving out stimulus funds, in differentiating between a “saved” job and a “created” job.
The White House argues that the actual job number is actually larger than 640,000 — closer to 1 million jobs when one factors in stimulus jobs added in October and, more importantly, jobs created indirectly, such as “the waitress who’s still on the job,” Vice President Biden said today.
So let’s see. Assuming their number is right — 160 billion divided by 1 million. Does that mean the stimulus costs taxpayers $160,000 per job?
Jared Bernstein, chief economist and senior economic advisor to the vice president, called that “calculator abuse.”
He said the cost per job was actually $92,000 — but acknowledged that estimate is for the whole stimulus package as of the end of 2010.
….
Of the 640,329 jobs cited today, White House officials said 80,000 were in the construction sector and more than half — 325,000 — were education jobs, despite President Obama’s claim in January that 90 percent of the stimulus jobs would be in the private sector. Bernstein said Mr. Obama’s pledge was an assessment of the totality of the jobs saved or created by the end of 2010.
The economy was left in shambles by the previous administration so drastic measures were required and the stimulus was part of that. Without it, we would be much worse off now that we are.
So tell me this, Mark – When does President Obama start bearing some responsibility? It is obvious nothing he has done has given us even an inkling of hope that there is an end in sight to this mess.
If you take out debt to “stimulate” economic growth and you do not achieve sufficient levels of economic growth to ultimately pay off the debt then at the end of the day all you have done is take out more debt.
If you try to pay for the debt by printing money (say, by having your central bank buy government t-bills using newly created money) at the end of the day all you are doing is debasing your currency.
This is not rocket science. All these guys are doing is taking care of their own and subtly monetizing the debts they are incurring.
Drastic action should been taken – they should have let the big banks holding bad debt to fail and thus cleansed the bad debt out of the system.
Spot on, Dan. This whole notion that an entity is ‘too big to fail’ is a fallacy. Rather than purging the system of these companies that needed to fail we have simply given them new life and have nothing to show for it.
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