Even An Eternal Optimist Has To Cry Over Stimulus Job Costs...

Truthfully, there is no telling whether the stimulus package was worth it or not. It's not all about the jobs that were created as much as the jobs that were saved. How many that is, nobody can truly tell. It could be that the stimulus package didn't save any jobs. On the other hand, without, we might be at 20% unemployment right now.
 
Yeap the tax cuts for the wealthy made it much harder to produce good results.
 
Truthfully, there is no telling whether the stimulus package was worth it or not. It's not all about the jobs that were created as much as the jobs that were saved. How many that is, nobody can truly tell. It could be that the stimulus package didn't save any jobs. On the other hand, without, we might be at 20% unemployment right now.

Good points but i think the real Unemployment Number is already close to 20%. I just see way too much Fuzzy Math to believe we're under 10% Unemployment. Also,most of these Stimulus created Jobs were likely Government Jobs. I think the Taxpayers got royally reamed again. We're supposed to be celebrating paying between $225k and $600k per job? That's just ludicrous to me. It makes no sense.
 
Truthfully, there is no telling whether the stimulus package was worth it or not. It's not all about the jobs that were created as much as the jobs that were saved. How many that is, nobody can truly tell. It could be that the stimulus package didn't save any jobs. On the other hand, without, we might be at 20% unemployment right now.

Good points but i think the real Unemployment Number is already close to 20%. I just see way too much Fuzzy Math to believe we're under 10% Unemployment. Also,most of these Stimulus created Jobs were likely Government Jobs. I think the Taxpayers got royally reamed again. We're supposed to be celebrating paying between $225k and $600k per job? That's just ludicrous to me. It makes no sense.

I didn't particularly care for the stimulus package as it was shaped. They only put around $45 billion into infrastructure spending. They should have put the entire stimulus into infrastructure and forgotten the rest. I am certain more jobs would have been created, and we would have actually gotten something concrete in return for the investment.
 
Enough to turn an Eternal Optimist into a depressed Pessimist. This is very sad.
 
Yet some politicians go on as if nothing is happening. Well we are in big trouble. It's time to stop putting Party before Country. It's time for tough adult decisions.
 
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I guess they're gonna keep on putting things off for another day. They seem to be very good at that. Seriously People,$225k to $600k per job? What a disaster. :(
 
Do you people get that the cost of doing something, like a road project, is more than just labor?

Is that too difficult a concept for you to understand?
 
Even by optimistic estimates,each Stimulus job cost Taxpayers between $225k and $600k. And we've been told we're supposed to be jumping for joy over this debacle? Yikes! :eek:...

Even by optimistic estimates, each stimulus job cost between $225k and $600k | David Freddoso | Beltway Confidential | Washington Examiner

Did it occur to you that you are acknowledging (probably unwittingly) that the stimulus bill did in fact save or create over 3 million jobs?

lol oops. Now I can refer your rightwing pals to you whenever they claim otherwise.
 
Do you people get that the cost of doing something, like a road project, is more than just labor?

Is that too difficult a concept for you to understand?



"Shovel ready" is too difficult a term for Barack Obama to understand......
 
Well, no wonder...
:eusa_eh:
Thousands of tax cheats get stimulus money
May 24, 2011, WASHINGTON — Thousands of companies that cashed in on President Barack Obama's economic stimulus package owed the government millions in unpaid taxes, congressional investigators have found.
The Government Accountability Office, in a report being released Tuesday, said at least 3,700 government contractors and nonprofit organizations that received more than $24 billion from the stimulus effort owed $757 million in back taxes as of Sept. 30, 2009, the end of the budget year. The report said the tax delinquents accounted for nearly 6 percent of the 63,000 contractors and grantees examined and cautioned that the real number might be higher because the known tax debt does not measure such factors as income underreporting. Among the examples was an engineering firm that received a $100,000 stimulus act contract but owed $6 million in taxes. The IRS called it "an extreme case of noncompliance." A social services nonprofit that received more than $1 million in stimulus funds owed taxes of $2 million. The GAO referred those two cases and 13 others to the IRS for further investigation.

On Tuesday, a Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs subcommittee will hold a hearing on the report. Federal law does not prohibit tax delinquents from getting government contracts or grants, though there are provisions that enable the government to withhold payments in some cases. While the federal government requires contractors to present documentation that their taxes are paid, some recipients escaped federal review because the money was disbursed at state or local levels. Sen. Carl Levin, D-Mich., chairman of the investigations subcommittee holding the hearing, said it's been known for years that a few federal contractors and grantees don't pay their taxes.

He said a program to recover funds from tax delinquents has been strengthened, and "the executive branch has made it clear" that nonpayment of tax can be grounds for denying a specific contract or barring a contractor from bidding on any contract. He added that the executive branch should "get on with it" and bar "the worst of the tax cheats from the contractor workforce." "It is a matter of basic fairness that those who take government money should be required to pay their taxes like everyone else," said Sen. Tom Coburn of Oklahoma, the panel's top Republican. "That such a huge amount of the stimulus money went to known tax cheats should be a wakeup call for Congress.'"

Read more: Thousands of tax cheats get stimulus money | Business | Chron.com - Houston Chronicle

See also:

IRS staff committed tax credit fraud
Monday, May 23, 2011 - More than 100 workers filed claims
More than 100 employees of the Internal Revenue Service cheated the government by fraudulently claiming a first-time homebuyer tax credit included in the 2008 and 2009 economic stimulus packages, according to federal investigators. The Treasury Department’s inspector general for tax administration, in several reports over the past few years, has identified a total of 128 IRS employees who claimed the credit but who also made other claims that showed they either weren’t first-time buyers or bought their homes outside the eligibility period for the credit, which was worth up to $8,000.

Meanwhile, one other IRS employee has been charged with using her position to try to help friends and relatives take advantage of the credit, which was signed by President Bush and then boosted under President Obama’s 2009 stimulus law. The IRS employees represented a small part of the total fraud in the program, which the inspector general said may have totaled more than a half-billion dollars overall. The inspector general said refundable tax credits, which transfer money back to taxpayers even when their tax liability is zero, “are targets for fraud.”

Members of Congress who have oversight over the IRS said it’s particularly egregious when the employees are caught cheating. “It is incomprehensible that this many IRS employees improperly claimed the homebuyer tax credit,” said Sen. Orrin G. Hatch of Utah, the top Republican on the Senate Finance Committee. “These are the very people who are supposed to fairly enforce our tax laws, but seem to instead be taking advantage of that expertise for their own personal benefit.”

Asked for comment, the IRS requested that The Washington Times submit questions in writing, which The Times did. Instead of answering the questions, spokesman Grant William issued a general statement saying the agency takes compliance with tax laws “very seriously” and promised “strong action, including dismissal” when it finds that an erroneous claim has been made. Mr. Williams did not respond to follow-up requests.

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Does that 225K-600K figure take into account the fact that roughly a third of the Stimulus were tax-cuts and that roughly another third was direct budget assistance to individual US states and municipalities? Or is that cleverly omitted as usual?
 
Granny says, "Dat's right" - so's dey can send her dat 2nd stimulus check...
:cool:
Summers: More stimulus needed
June 13, 2011: Larry Summers argued in two op-ed pieces that the federal government must do more to get the economy back on track.
Larry Summers, formerly one of the top economic advisors to President Obama, is advocating more government stimulus to jumpstart the struggling U.S. economy. In opinion pieces Monday in the Washington Post and Financial Times, Summers, who was the first director of the National Economic Council under Obama, says that the United States is at risk of falling into a "Lost Decade" of prolonged weak economic growth and high unemployment unless more action is taken in the near term. "We averted Depression in 2008/2009 by acting decisively. Now we can avert a lost decade by recognizing economic reality," he wrote.

Summers wrote that demand is likely to stay weak without the government taking steps to spur spending. He said the U.S. could have fallen into a double-dip recession already if not for the tax cuts and payroll tax holiday passed at the end of last year. "The central irony of financial crisis is that while it is caused by too much confidence, borrowing and lending, and spending, it is resolved only by increases in confidence, borrowing and lending, and spending," he wrote in both columns. Summers argued that the debate over how best to cut federal government's deficit and long-term debt outlook shouldn't take precedent over doing more to promote economic growth in the short-term. "The greatest threat to the nation's creditworthiness is a sustained period of slow growth," he wrote.

Among the proposals he made is increasing the size of the payroll tax holiday from 2% of income to 3% of income, and expanding it so that employers also get a break from paying the tax that goes to support Social Security. "At a near-term cost of a little more than $200 billion, these measures offer the prospect of significant improvement in economic performance over the next few years translating into significant increases in the tax base and reductions in necessary government outlays," he said in the Washington Post column. He also advocated more spending on public works projects in the near-term, arguing in the Financial Times that the government should "take advantage of a moment when 10-year interest rates are below 3 percent and construction unemployment approaches 20 percent."

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