Stim Bill job numbers: What could you do with $533,000?

By Rick Moran

What the Obama administration is doing with that amount of money is creating exactly one job as a result of the stimulus bill, according to Conn Carroll at the Heritage Foundation blog The Foundry:

The Obama administration released the first hard numbers on how many jobs their $787 billion stimulus package has created or saved on Recovery.gov today. The number: 30,383 jobs from roughly $16 billion worth of stimulus contracts awarded directly by federal agencies.

Crunching the numbers, that comes to $533,000 per job "saved or created." To put those 30,383 jobs in perspecitve, consider that the U.S. economy lost 263,000 net jobs just last month and has lost 3.6 million net jobs since President Barack Obama was sworn into office.

But the administration also claims that federal contractor spending is just one portion of the overall stimulus "buckshot." Last month at the Brookings Institute, Vice President Joe Biden claimed that White House computer models showed their stimulus plan had already saved between 500,000 and 750,000. And just how accurate are these White House economic models? Well, when the White House was pitching its plan to the American people, White House economic adviser Jared Bernstein wrote a report claiming the stimulus would keep unemployment under a peak of 8%. And what have actual Bureau of Labor and Statistics shown? A a 26-year record high of 9.8% unemployment rate.

It's true that the bulk of stim money is going to the states so it is impossible to verify anyone's real figures about the impact of the bill. We know that less than a quarter of the $787 billion has been released so far. We know that it hasn't performed as Obama promised it would.

But half a million bucks for each job directly created as a result of monies from the bill? If they had simply given that money to 30,000 entrepreneurs to create new businesses or expand existing ones, I daresay we would be much farther down the road toward recovery. Small businessmen would have taken that half a million and created jobs with it.

Instead, it went to Obama's union friends and others who supported the president in 2008. And we're stuck with unemployment in the stratosphere and no end in sight to job losses.