CBO Report: Stimulus Spending Added $831 Billion In Deficits, May Have Cost $4.1 Million Per Job
A new report from the CBO details some pretty ugly numbers for President Obama’s “stimulus spending.” The estimate of the cost of that spending has gone up to $831 billion, and according to the jobs numbers, each job attributed to the “stimulus spending” cost at least hundreds of thousands of taxpayer dollars each.
When [the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act] was being considered, the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) and the staff of the Joint Committee on Taxation estimated that it would increase budget deficits by $787 billion between fiscal years 2009 and 2019. CBO now estimates that the total impact over the 2009–2019 period will amount to about $831 billion.
By CBO’s estimate, close to half of that impact occurred in fiscal year 2010, and more than 90 percent of ARRA’s budgetary impact was realized by the end of March 2012. CBO has estimated the law’s impact on employment and economic output using evidence about the effects of previous similar policies and drawing on various mathematical models that represent the workings of the economy. …
On that basis CBO estimates that ARRA’s policies had the following effects in the first quarter of calendar year 2012 compared with what would have occurred otherwise:
– They raised real (inflation-adjusted) gross domestic product (GDP) by between 0.1 percent and 1.0 percent,
– They lowered the unemployment rate by between 0.1 percentage points and 0.8 percentage points,
– They increased the number of people employed by between 0.2 million and 1.5 million,
– They increased the number of full-time-equivalent jobs by 0.3 million to 1.9 million. (Increases in FTE jobs include shifts from part-time to full-time work or overtime and are thus generally larger than increases in the number of employed workers.)
Jim Pethokoukis does the math, and note that “the current cost-per-job created is somewhere between $4.1 million and $540,000.”
Even the best-case scenario for President Obama has each job created/saved costing taxpayers over a half-million each. And that’s stipulating to the “stimulus” jobs created/saved numbers, which are notoriously sketchy.
How, exactly, does one quantify a job saved?
The stimulus has been a failure. You can’t stimulate the economy by borrowing money and spending it any more than you can fill a swimming pool by taking water from one end and pouring it into the other end.
Tags: Economy, Stimulus
