Quote:
Originally Posted by Tyrone Slothrop
Let's go back to this for a minute. Suppose the cost per job was something like $250K. Where does that money go? Do you think the government is hiring new bureaucrats to administer stimulus grants, and that you have three bureaucrats making $75K each for each construction worker making $25K? That doesn't work, since that's four jobs for the $250K, not one. But if it did, wouldn't that be stimulating the economy? Those people can now pay for food, and housing, and entertainment, so the money gets spent, and that's what the economy needs. How do you make sense of this $250K/job business?
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Depends what the money is used for. In this stimulus, a lot went to tax breaks that went in turn to savings accounts, or to paying off debts. Not much job creation there. In some gov't spending -- not the Obama stimulus, to any great extent that I'm aware -- money goes off-shore. For example, how much has been spent on the SF Bay Bridge, and how much of that has gone to creating jobs in China?
There is also the issue of "creating" versus "saving" jobs. I already commented on this, and I believe that you have done so before. Those who want to puff the "$/jobs" figure look only to new jobs created, not old ones that would have been lost.
I've registered my skepticism of the $250k/job figure, so the above is not meant to support that.
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