From the web...
Last July, The Weekly Standard highlighted one of the council’s reports. Using what it called “mainstream estimates of economic multipliers for the effects of fiscal stimulus,” the council at that time estimated that the stimulus had created or saved just under 2.4 million jobs at a cost of $666 billion—which meant a cost to taxpayers of $278,000 per job. The administration cried foul, responding that the stimulus “was more than a measure to create or save jobs.” It was also an “investment” in things “critical to America’s long-term success” and therefore couldn’t adequately be judged on the basis of its cost per job created (or saved).
But the stimulus was certainly sold to the American people as a means to get the economy moving and hence to create jobs. In early 2009 (when the reported unemployment rate was 7.3 percent), Obama’s first head of the CEA, Christina Romer, said the legislation was needed to keep unemployment below 8 percent. She predicted that, by this time in 2012, the stimulus would have caused unemployment to fall below 6 percent. Instead, after the “stimulus” was passed, the unemployment rate hit 10 percent, and it has now stayed above 8 percent for more than three years.
Whether the Obama administration intended for the stimulus to be a job-creating measure or an “investment” in pet projects and constituencies, this much is clear: For every $278,000 in taxpayer-funded stimulus money that the administration spent as of the July report, only one job was added or saved. And that’s according to an estimate from Obama’s own economists.
And it has gotten worse from there. Last December, Obama’s economists published another report, this one covering the period through the second quarter of 2011 (and released five months late). That report showed that the stimulus had by then cost $697 billion and had created or saved some 2.2 million jobs. That works out to a cost to taxpayers of $317,000 per job—again, according to Obama’s economists.
Moreover, the December report marked the sixth straight quarterly report showing that the stimulus’s cost per job is rising: In reports spanning January 2010 through December 2011, the stimulus’s cost per job more than doubled, rising from $146,000 (in January 2010) to $317,000 (in December 2011). With each passing quarter, the stimulus has become an even worse deal for taxpayers. Given this trajectory, is it any wonder the administration doesn’t seem eager to fulfill its legal requirement to release reports from the third and fourth quarters of 2011 and the first quarter of 2012?
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Suck on that lefties.
