The Math Of Obama’s Stimulus Spending Doesn’t Work
So says Caroline Baum:
Obama has been working with his advisers so that the proposed $750-billion-and-counting package of tax breaks and spending on infrastructure, education, health care and unemployment insurance is ready to go on Day One. (No on-the-job training necessary!)
There are currently about 10 million unemployed workers in the U.S. (The Bureau of Labor Statistics defines as unemployed those persons who didn’t work in the week of the monthly employment survey, were available for work and made an effort to find work in the previous month.)
“If we write a check for $75,000 to each of the unemployed, we won’t have anyone ‘unemployed,’” said former Treasury Secretary Paul O’Neill.
The recipients may not be working in the traditional sense of going to the office each day, but the government can provide for their needs without anyone having to lift a finger.
The Obama administration’s goal of creating 3 million new jobs by January 2011 will run smack into “the natural demographic flow, which will add 3.2 million people to the workforce” in the same time period, O’Neill said. In effect, “we are going to spend $750 billion, the number of unemployed will rise and the (unemployment) rate will go down slightly.”
Shoveling to Prosperity
O’Neill did the math so you don’t have to. Each job “will cost $250,000, which doesn’t suggest much labor intensity for the dollars spent,” he said. “It makes me wonder if any of the planners or commentators are good at arithmetic.”
Something tells me that Obama and his people don’t much are about the math of this. I mean, they can’t be that woefully ignorant. Can they?
