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Economy
CBO: Obama stimulus may have cost as much as $4.1 million a job
2012-06-01
The Congressional Budget Office in a new report:

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.)

OK, so without the stimulus, there would be anywhere from 200,000 to 1.5 million fewer people employed right now? That means the current cost-per-job created is somewhere between $4.1 million and $540,000.
Posted by:Beavis

#8  I'm thinking the much of the stimulus went to Obumble's re-election campaign in one way or another--to the unions, to bundlers who supported him, to the solar companies, various pro-Democrat groups and organizations.
Posted by: JohnQC   2012-06-01 14:42  

#7  BP,

but the pathetic recovery has held the G bond rate way down; the 10 year has averaged under 3% (its been under 2% the past month or so) and the 30 yr G bond has averaged about 3.5% during the Obama presidency and
Posted by: Lord Garth   2012-06-01 11:38  

#6  @4% bond yield to pay the debt each job costing 540,000 would need to pay 21600 EXTRA tax to break even with the debt funding costs...

Don't even ask if the job costs 4.1M!!

Solyndranomics.
Posted by: Bright Pebbles   2012-06-01 10:45  

#5  Terminology again.

Of the $900B, about $100B went to public sector infrastructure. Of the $100B, about $80B went for transportation. The amount spent on structures (including both highway and transit) was about $20B (a bit over 2% of the ARRA). However some of that went to correcting safety problems, enhancing pedestrian access over bridges, removing asbestos paint, etc. so the amount of 'fixing' depends on what you think 'fixing' is.
Posted by: lord garth   2012-06-01 07:50  

#4  Fear not, "Shovel Ready" Utopia is at hand.
Posted by: Besoeker   2012-06-01 03:48  

#3  Whoops - that's more like $6Tril, but a thousand is like a million these days.
Posted by: newc   2012-06-01 01:53  

#2  I just wanted Infrastructure fixed and that was a $6 Bill at the time. Only .03% of this stimuli from leviathan octopi went to "fixin the bridges".

Temporary union status and voting front groups.
The American Dream - yay.
Posted by: newc   2012-06-01 01:52  

#1  unfortunately there is a major terminology problem

the ave employment is .2M to 1.5M per year
that is .6M to 4.5M job/years
so that's between $170k and $1.3M per job/year
but that is just in the late 2009 to late 2011 period

in the out years the impact depends on the B/C of the projects funded and we don't have any good information on this although given the political nature of the projects, the ARRA will probably a net loss of job/years beginning late this year
Posted by: lord garth   2012-06-01 00:36  

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