Sunday, July 04, 2010

Once Again, Job Numbers Aren’t Adding Up

Even in the same story!

Mr Obama said the projects would provide more than 5,000 new jobs.

Hmmm…

According to the company’s website, 1,500 new jobs will be created during the plant’s construction with 100 positions for staff to maintain it.

[...]

Plants will be built in Colorado and Indiana, creating 2,000 construction jobs and 1,500 permanent jobs, the Associated Press reports.

Ok, so I guess Obama is right.  This will allegedly “create” more than 5,000 jobs.  5,100, to be precise.  Of course, only about 1,600 of those will be permanent - assuming that the private sector will adopt what the government stimulus is creating.  Otherwise, it’ll take yet more taxpayer money or those jobs will go away. 

Meanwhile, let’s evaluate the cost… for 5,100 jobs - only 1,600 of which are more than temporary, it will cost $392,157 per job.  Wow. 

Finally, I’m glad the story mentioned this:

Around 125,000 jobs were lost in the last month, the government reported.

As we saw with the Bucyrus fiasco, the green initiatives do come at a cost of other sectors of the economy.  It’s hard for me to get excited about spending nearly $400k per job when we lost 125,000 jobs in the last month.  Perhaps a more viable structural solution is in order.

(2) Comments
Posted by Owen at 1818 hrs
Economy + Politics + Politics - General

  1. None of the math has ever worked on the Stimulus. It was hastily designed, poorly administered, and is filled with political paybacks, graft, waste and fraud.

    Like I’ve long said, For the trillion dollars we wasted, I could have hired 5 million people in $50,000/year jobs and employed them for 4 years. Oddly, even by the Obumbler administration’s inflated estimates, they have only added (or saved) 600,000 jobs… and many of those were very temporary in nature and have already expired (if they existed at all).

    The math doesn’t work. This is more of a plumbing issue really… we flushed a trillion dollars down the toilet.

    On the bright side though, the very BEST thing for the economy is more people being unemployed… at least according to the Speaker of the House. Perhaps that’s what they mean by “Summer of Recovery”. Mission Accomplished.

    Posted by .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address) on July 05, 2010 at 1023 hrs


  2. It is genarally accepted that it takes an investment of $50-60K to “create” a new private sector job.  so using the math above, the same investment could have created approximately 30600 jobs, for a net loss of 25,400 jobs.  That seems to comport with reality a lot closer than the BHO numbers.

    Posted by .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address) on July 06, 2010 at 1211 hrs


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