Saturday, October 31, 2009

Stimulus: $250,000 Per Job (Allegedly) Created

The stimulus program has created or saved just over 640,000 jobs so far, the Obama administration claimed yesterday. Based on $159 billion in spending so far of the total $787 billion, each job (allegedly) "saved or created" has cost American taxpayers $248,500. According to a report on ABC's World News Tonight last evening, when confronted by this math, the White House characterized it dismissively as "calculator abuse."

According to NBC, the majority of those jobs (325,000) were teachers and other school employees. What's their average salary, I wonder? Probably significantly under $50,000 per year, I would guess. So why the other $200K on average for each job?
To make matters worse, this stimulus money has been effectively borrowed from the Chinese and other creditors of the Federal government, meaning that we'll continue to pay interest on these amounts as well for the foreseeable future, since the government can't afford to repay these loans.
Where is this taking us? Maybe, like the image above, to 7734 upside down on that calculator we're abusing....

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