Filed under: Capitalism, Economy, Liberalism, Politics | Tags: "Recovery Summer", Stimulus Funds Squandered, Vice President Joe Biden
You will notice that the purple section of the pie chart is missing. The Congressional Budget Office (CBO) recently released a report claiming that the $814 billion “stimulus” has added 3.5 million net jobs —astounding the 3.5 million Americans who have lost their jobs and remained unemployed since the stimulus was enacted in February 2009. The CBO has to work with the statistics they are given, and what they were given came out of Keynesian computerized economic programs.
The Beltway is the most prosperous area of the country,while across the nation it takes $2 million to create a pothole-filling job. Never before in history has Washington spent so much to get so little real work.
This last week, we have the example revealed of disappointing employment generation in how $111 million in stimulus money has so far funded just 55 public-works jobs in Los Angeles. City Controller Wendy Gruel says that two municipal departments, Public Works and Transportation, plan eventually to create or save 264 jobs with that money, but the contracting process is so slow that most of the money is still waiting to be spent.
So the price tag per job is up to $2 million . Even if the city departments meet their target of 264 jobs with that money, the price tag will drop to only $420,000 per job. Even overpaid workers won’t actually get that much. Some of the money goes to capital costs and to contractors profits, and some of it goes to the normal process of government contracting. Bureaucrats have no particular need to push things through quickly, weeks or months late make no difference.
Vice President Joe Biden cited an example on Friday in which the New York City Department of Transportation is spending $175 million to renovate bridges and a parking lot, putting all of 129 people to work. That adds up to $1.46 million per job. A project in Ohio that’s on Biden’s list cost $138 million and created 300 jobs that cost $460,000 per worker.
I know math is hard, but this is ridiculous. $111 million divided by 55 is more than embarrassing, it’s scandalous. Operating on way too much hope here and too little change.
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[...] accounting of where all that “stimulus” money went, and in handy pie-chart form! Click here to see it. It makes everything so [...]
Pingback by Finally, an accounting of where all that “stimulus” money went, and in handy pie-chart form! « The TrogloPundit September 21, 2010 @ 7:27 am