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Nearly 650,000 Unverifiable Jobs Created or Saved
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Yesterday the Obama administration announced that to date 640,000 jobs have been created or saved as a result of the $787 trillion stimulus package which was passed earlier this year. The administration also noted that it is on track to meet the president’s goal of creating or saving 3.5 million jobs by the end of next year. Also to date the administration has failed to prove that even one job has been created or saved as a result of the stimulus and cannot even provide data differentiating which jobs have been created versus those that have been saved.
Of course on the same day that this triumphant news was announced from the White House, the Dow Jones Industrial Average dropped nearly 250 points. It seems that the folks on Wall Street do not have a lot of confidence in the administration’s claims and/or optimism that a robust recovery is underway.
Really though, why should they after the initial jobs report provided by the administration turned out to be wrought with errors, miscalculation and flat-out lies? The initial report was only claiming that 30,000 jobs had been created or saved, but as it now appears that figure was two to three times higher than what it should have been. And that is only assuming that the methodology which the administration is using is even valid, which is highly questionable at best.
So while the administration was way off on its 30,000 jobs claim, it is now expecting the American public to believe that its 650,000 jobs claim is accurate. And VP Joe Biden takes it even farther in claiming that in reality over 1 million jobs have been created. Perhaps Biden subscribes to the old theory that the bigger the lie the more likely people are to believe it. Already though, several errors have been found in the administration’s new numbers which are basically the same types of errors in the initial 30,000 jobs claim.
Beyond the errors, as it did with the Cash for Clunkers program, the administration is not taking into account jobs that would have been saved or created even without the stimulus package. But simply using the administration’s figures shows just how costly and efficient the stimulus has. To date, $215 billion of the stimulus monies have been spent. That means it has cost approximately $336,000 to create or save each of those 640,000 jobs. Given that most of the jobs have been in education, that seems kind of high since most teachers and administrators do not make anything close to $336,000 per year.
Even if the administration meets its goal of creating or saving 3.5 million jobs by the end of next year, those jobs will come at a cost of approximately $225,000 each. According to Biden though, the stimulus is “operating as advertised,” so inefficiency was apparently a part of the plan all along.
Of course the real truth to all of this is that the Obama administration has yet to create even one net job in the economy. Since Obama has taken office, the economy has shed almost 3 million jobs. That leaves him 6.5 million in the hole to meet his goal of creating or saving 3.5 million jobs by the end of next year. That is looking more difficult to meet given that new unemployment claims are holding steady at approximately 525,000 over the past 4-week moving average.
However, if the economy actually does gain 6.5 million new jobs by the end of next year then the stimulus plan will go down in history as a rousing success. Given its poor track record so far though, it is more likely that it will go down as the most expensive and inefficient program in the nation’s history.
Rob Binsrick
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