Even Using Obama's Bogus Standards Porkulus Spent Between $230 & $590,000 Per Job Created/Saved

When the unemployment rate hit 10% the administration became desperate to make the president look good   since that number blew through the presidential promise that if his stimulus bill was passed, unemployment would not rise higher than 8%.

The spike in unemployment was a black-eye to the president and additional proof that the President's plan... the government spending like a drunken sailor on shore leave, did  very little to help the economy. The administration became so embarrassed about the bad numbers, they changed the playing field. Job Creation was no longer the bell weather statistic, it became something bogus, Jobs Created or Saved.

This is how William McGurn described the term for the Wall Street Journal:

"To begin with, the number is pure fiction -- the administration has no way to measure how many jobs are actually being 'saved.' And if we had tried to use something this flimsy, the press would never have let us get away with it." 

“How do you know what a saved job is? How do you know what jobs would have been lost without this?” Davis said. “That was a clever political gimmick to make it even harder to determine whether this policy has any effect.”

Here's the sad part, even using the bogus "Jobs Created or Saved" the latest CBO numbers show that the the stimulus plan was a horrible waste of money.

In CBO  report released yesterday (embedded below), called “Estimated Impact of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act on Employment and Economic Output from October Through December 2010" the bi-partisan CBO reported that the porkuous plan now is projected to dump up to  $821 billion into the progressives Keynesian black hole, up from the original projection of $787 billion.

In the same report, the CBO estimated that in the fourth quarter of 2010 there were somewhere between 1.3 million and 3.5 million people who were then employed who would not have been the d the stimulus not been enacted. “CBO estimates,” says the report, “that ARRA’s policies had the following effects in the fourth quarter of calendar year 2010: … Increased the number of people employed by between 1.3 million and 3.5 million.”

Now again, remember that this is a totally inflated bogus number. They are not only using the number of people who got jobs, but some number pulled out of their progressive "arses" to estimate how many people didn't get fired because of the stimulus bill.

The CBO’s estimate that there were 1.3 million to 3.5 million people employed in the fourth quarter of 2010 who would not have been were it not for the stimulus represents a decline from the 1.4 million to 3.6 million people CBO estimated were employed as a result the stimulus during the third quarter of 2010. [See Table 1 on page 11 in the report below.] In fact, CBO now estimates that the apogee of the stimulus’s net job-creating-and-saving power occurred in the third quarter of 2010 when it believes somewhere between 1.4 million and 3.6 million people had jobs they would not have had except for the stimulus.

The rest is simple math, the $821 billion cost of the stimulus divided by the maximum of 3.6 million jobs the CBO believes may have saved or created equals an average of $228,055 per job. Using their  low estimate 1.4 million jobs you get an average of  $586,428 per job created plus people who would have been fired but kept their positions simply because of the $800+ billion load of pig lard.

At the lower end of the CBO’s top job-creating-and-saving estimate for the stimulus—1.4 million jobs—the jobs would cost an average of $586,428 a piece.

Even at the lower level of $228 thousand per job it show that the Porkulus plan was a waste. Think about it, they could have paid every unemployed person $100,000 and still have saved $461 billion. Not that I would recommend that particular approach, but imagine where our economy would be today if those funds were put into tax reductions--more jobs for less costs.

02-23-ARRA