Wednesday, July 6, 2011

Obama’s Own Economic Advisers Concludes Stimulus Jobs Cost Taxpayers $278,000 Each

Which, of course, prompted the Obama administration to try and throw its own Council of Economic Advisers under the bus:

The White House on Tuesday sharply disputed a report that uses data from President Obama’s economic advisers to claim that jobs created or saved by the stimulus bill cost taxpayers $278,000 each.

The report released by the president’s Council of Economic Advisers late Friday ahead of the July 4 holiday weekend estimated the Recovery Act saved or created between 2.4 million and 3.6 million jobs by the end of March 2011. Spending equaled $666 billion by that time.

“That’s a cost to taxpayers of $278,000 per job,” according to the Weekly Standard, a Washington, D.C.-based magazine. “In other words, the government could simply have cut a $100,000 check to everyone whose employment was allegedly made possible by the ’stimulus,’ and taxpayers would have come out $427 billion ahead.”

The Obama administration’s response? It’s all lies, and the stimulus bill wasn’t just about jobs anyway:

“The Recovery Act was more than a measure to create and save jobs; it was also an investment in American infrastructure, education and industries that are critical to America’s long-term success and investment in the economic future of America’s working families,” White House spokeswoman Liz Oxhorn said in a statement to FoxNews.com.

And here you thought the stimulus bill was about creating job through “investment” (read: spending) on infrastructure, education, etc. Guess it all depends on what your definition of “stimulus” is.

Regardless, this cost per job created/saved is undoubtedly law because it uses the bogus jobs created/saved metric. If you calculated the number just on new jobs which didn’t exist before the stimulus, then the number would be much higher.

Of course, the stimulus itself is a failure. We have millions fewer jobs now than when the recession started.

sayanythingblog.com

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