Animation: Job Creation and Destruction, Regionally, Over the Past 5 Years

From Instapundit, who noted that at the end, it looks like the Apocalypse.

Very Missile-Command-ish.

It's been calculated that for each of the paltry number of jobs Obama's Spendulus has "saved or created," it cost the taxpayer a whopping $72,408.

The White House denies this with silly spin.

Basic math would indicate that $2.2 billion spent to create 30,383 jobs would indicate a cost per job of $72,408.

But the White House rejects this.

Recovery Act spokeswoman Elizabeth Oxhorn says that “this contract money doesn’t just go toward labor/wages for workers – it also funds things like purchase of equipment and supplies which also creates jobs.”

Um, whatever the money was spent on, if it was spent to create these jobs, it was spent to create these jobs.

But they claim, naturally, that there all these hidden jobs being saved or created that no one knows about:

Moreover, she points out that “the job numbers reported by recipients and posted today are only direct jobs – or those workers whose paychecks are funded directly by the Recovery Act. That hits the labor/wages part of the equation, but there are also jobs created and saved from the purchasing of equipment and supplies (known as indirect jobs) and the additional purchasing power workers on these projects have that they wouldn’t without the job (known as induced jobs) that is not reflected in these numbers – which, of course, affects the bottom line of doing averages like this one. When you account for all of the non-direct jobs, much different scenario.

Actually the numbers do not indicate which jobs were saved or created by the Spendulus money -- as I pointed out here earlier, Obama's dictate to the states was to credit any job being paid by Spendulus money as "saved or created" by the Spendulus money. In other words, if you have a budget shortage, and you use some of that money (say just $100 a month) to partly pay for a long-time employee you never intended to fire, that is chalked up as a job "saved or created" by the Spendulus. If even a single dollar is used to pay a guy's salary, per the White House's rules of reporting, that's a Spendulus job.

Obviously they constructed this jackass rule to falsely report a large number of "saved or created" jobs -- and they still get these paltry figures, and still have to rely on hidden jobs that no one can prove were "saved or created" to save them.

More on this, with different math coming up with a $500,000+ cost per job "saved or created."

Number of jobs saved or created in Michigan? 397.

“Despite numerous promises from Congressional Democrats, there are still 15.1 million Americans out of work,” said Ken Spain, spokesman for the National Republican Congressional Committee. “After wasting taxpayer dollars to produce an unimpressive 397 jobs in Michigan, middle-class families are still asking one thing: Where are the jobs?”

How about New York? $500 million spent. Congratulations, you have just saved or created fifty four jobs.

The feds have spent a half-billion dollars on 10 of the largest government stimulus contracts in New York City and Long Island -- but created or retained only 54 jobs.

That's an astounding $9 million per job.

Correction: Past five years, not past 20, as I originally had in the headline. Not sure where I got that.

posted by Ace at 01:24 PM

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