Veronique de Rugy looks at the most recent claims of the number of jobs created or saved by Obama’s stimulus, and finds that most of the new jobs are in the public sector. The cost to “create” these jobs is eye-watering, too:
The White House claims that 640,329 were created or saved. That, by the way, is way less than what Christina Romer claimed would be created. Last week, she mentioned 1.4 million during a Joint Committee hearing. Remember.
First, $159 billion has been spent so far. That’s $248,273 per job.
However, when you look at some specific contracts that were awarded you find that some jobs were created or saved at an insane cost to taxpayers. For instance, $1,359,633,501 were awarded to CH2M WG IDAHO LLC, in WA to create 2,183 jobs. That’s $622,827 per job. That’s not as bad though as the $258,646,800 awarded to the Brookhaven Science Associates, LLC in NY, to create 25 jobs. That’s over $10.3 million per job.
I would be happy with one of these jobs.
Second, while the administration is promising good and in time reporting, we can see that it’s far from being the case. Agencies report having spent $207.3 Billion and yet only $36,688,660,161 were reported by states. That’s a big gap, isn’t it?
Third, some 85 percent of the money went to 4 agencies: HHS, Labor, Education and Social Security. That money wasn’t spent on shovel ready projects. For instance, some of the HHS funds went to some rural high school and college students from Arkansas, Kentucky and Tennessee to conduct medical research this summer with a team of leading scientists at Vanderbilt University. The Department of Labor spent $11,058,877 in unemployment insurance (UI) modernization incentive funds to the state of West Virginia. And the Department of Education is mainly spending its money to keep union protected school teachers in their jobs. Not really shovel ready projects, are they?
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