Tweet
I’m just going to quote from the article.
When the Obama administration releases a report on the Friday before a long weekend, it’s clearly not trying to draw attention to the report’s contents. Sure enough, the “Seventh Quarterly Report” on the economic impact of the “stimulus,” released on Friday, July 1, provides further evidence that President Obama’s economic “stimulus” did very little, if anything, to stimulate the economy, and a whole lot to stimulate the debt.
The report was written by the White House’s Council of Economic Advisors, a group of three economists who were all handpicked by Obama, and it chronicles the alleged success of the “stimulus” in adding or saving jobs. The council reports that, using “mainstream estimates of economic multipliers for the effects of fiscal stimulus” (which it describes as a “natural way to estimate the effects of” the legislation), the “stimulus” has added or saved just under 2.4 million jobs — whether private or public — at a cost (to date) of $666 billion. That’s a cost to taxpayers of $278,000 per job.
The article also tells us,
Meanwhile, the national debt at the end of 2008, when Obama was poised to take office, was $9.986 trillion (see Table S-9). It’s now $14.467 trillion — and counting.
28 Comments
The Weakly Standard! HA HA HA HA…..
Bailing out AIG the banks GM, GE and keeping all those failed CEO’s hired without a cut in pay I’m sure skewed the numbers.
Was the GM Union members loss of GM stock for their pensions included as a cost of the bailout?
We need jobs for regular people not CEO’s
So now ur saying there should be no stimulus so we can keep the deficit down? Isn’t that the politics of austerity-no stimulus?
When so much of the faux stimulus was tax cuts, I’m not surprised that actual jobs cost $278,000 per job. And what sort of ROI does that get: how long are people in those jobs and over that time, how much do they earn? There’s a lot not accounted for here.
Nice job in totally discrediting yourself. But take heart you’re in good company both Speaker Beohner and Douglas Holtz-Ekain jumped on that totally false canard.
We are saying what we always said bank bailout was not Stimulus. Obama’s Stimulus was directed at the wrong people the rich.
Regular people need jobs.
Do tell us why it’s “totally false”, won’t you? Don’t be shy.
The bailout was the TARP, that was first voted on with Paulson in 2008. The stimulus Obama passed next year-about $874 billion wasn’t focused on the banks. Christina Romer-rigtly I believe-said it should have been larger but that wasn’t the bailout. The Weekly Standard is attacking the stimulus in principle as being demand side vs supply side. If you are supply side like the Standard and most Right wing think tanks you would prefer stimulus directed at the banks as opposed to main street as you are anti-Keynsian.
Not just Romer, but the much despised Summners also said it should have been larger.
See this goes back to my whole theory that everybodyy wants to pile on to Obama so bad they will use any old argument even ones that are very suspect. Honestly I mean I read the Standard, to keep my enemies close so to speak, but one has to read anything they say very advisedly as you would say reading the Cato Institutes front webpage.
Would you kindly tell us what is false about the claim of $278K / job? According to Bill Egnor, it’s “totally false”, so I imagine, if that’s true, then it should be easy to debunk.
Even Obama piles on Obama – didn’t you hear his recent comments bashing the tax breaks on private jets? Those private jet tax breaks came from Obama’s own stimulus!
Maybe Obama should join FDL?
:D
They’re not listening to common sense over there…
You’d think this would be obvious.
Check the unemployment figures before and after.
Yeah, that was the best laugh I’ve had in awhile now. As you might imagine, Conservative bloggers are rolling in the aisles…
BDude, it’s the Weekly Standard, and I don’t know what to think. I’m on board for the stimulus being mostly wasteful and not getting any bang for the buck. But I can never trust an article from the Weekly Standard. And I’m not an economist, so all this does is make me wonder if Bill Egnor is actually right.
Can we get the same news from a more credible source?
This is the source document in question where they give a wide range of numbers between 2.5 million to 3.6 million jobs:
“The analysis indicates that the Recovery Act has raised the level of GDP substantially relative to what it otherwise would have been and has saved or created between 2.5 and 3.6 million jobs as of the fourth quarter of 2010.
The report begins in Section II with a summary of the spending and tax reductions that have occurred under the ARRA to date. As of the end of December 2010, about 80 percent of the original $787 billion included in the Act has been outlayed or has gone to American households and businesses in the form of tax reductions.”
http://www.whitehouse.gov/sites/default/files/microsites/20110318-cea-arra-report.pdf
So per the White House – which I don’t consider a credible source, but the question was about what the source document said – that puts the cost between $180K and $250K per job, which seems grossly inefficient…we would have been better off drawing names at random from the unemployment rolls and sending them five figure checks.
Yeah say hi to Andrew Breitbart for me.
Bottom line, the Standard is critical of any stimulus, it’s the old supply sider canard. Bottomline there are people who will turn to any source if its to knock Obama. Drudge, and Breitbart have plenty of “facts” as well, which perhaps you consider a source more credible.
You seriously think $180K-250K per job is efficient? I am using the White House’s own figures.
Ok, well that works for me. They should have just hired people at 60k a year.
Obama’s stimulus was too small, and it didn’t do very much to help the economy, making it easy for some people to discount the whole policy approach.
IMO it would have been much better if Obama had absolutely demanded a much larger stimulus, and said that the situation would be dire if it failed. Assuming the republicans had refused, he should have taken the case to the people. If he’d clearly lost out and the republicans had kept him from getting the stimulus he’d asked for, it would look bad for the republicans when the economy tanked as predicted.
This is the sort of thing that makes me think of Nobel-Prize winner Paul Krugman’s comments about Obama’s stimulus in a piece called “Not Enough Audacity”:
I agree. There is something very broken about that $180K-250K per job.
In fact, what should happen is that those people who the government directly hires have money in their pockets to buy stuff, making them customers. Having a bunch of new customers in turn creates more jobs at the companies they buy from. Which, in turn puts money in more people’s pockets and creates more customers, and still more demand for more stuff to be produced.
If things are done efficiently, the money paid to each person should go through the cycle and help create a number of new jobs.
To add to my comment above: I think Obama’s stimulus was poorly done as well as being too small. In the statement above, I just wanted to make clear my perspective that economic stimulus is still a valid economic tool, even if Obama’s actions discredit it.
Wait is O including tax cuts as stimulus money to create jobs? But But that didn’t work to create jobs under 8 years of Bush.
If tax cuts are called stimulus to create jobs those numbers should be removed from any job stimulus category.
Why facts are not in evidence they create jobs and we have 8 years of Bush 2 years of Obama real world examples for that.