Archive for February 3rd, 2010

Roughly a year after the $787 billion stimulus bill became law, the Obama administration is claiming that it created or saved 1.7-2 million jobs. While that’s at least better than the 640,000 it was claiming in October, for 2 million jobs, that still comes out to $393,500 per job. Spread over 2 years, that’s still $196,750 per job per year–nice work if you can get it! That’s quite a bit higher than the average wage plus benefits afforded to federal government workers ($119,982 per year) and much higher than that earned by private sector workers ($59,908).

It suggests that if the goal were simply to create or save jobs, the stimulus bill is doing this in a very inefficient fashion. If the government had simply paid people $100,000 in salary and benefits (and administration costs) for two years, it could have created 3,935,000 of these “jobs.” I’m not sure what we’d get out of people having these “jobs,” but it’s not entirely clear what we’ve gotten out of the stimulus yet, either.