Stimulus Trivia

PresBo and his cronies are running around trying to sell us all on the idea that the stimulus was a great success. So, in honor of that concept, let's look at some little-known aspects of the stimulus program.

It costs $95k per job
Jamie Dupree did an analysis of how much money had been spent and how many jobs it created, and it seems that it costs government $95,000 to create one job.
http://wsbradio.com/blogs/jamie_dupree/2010/02/9630580-per-job.html

Of that, $57.3 billion has actually been doled out in awards - which has resulted in 595,262.53 "Jobs Created/Saved." That rounds to 595,263, which is prominently displayed on the home page. So, a little elementary math. Take that $57.3 billion figure (the grants awarded) and divide it by the number of jobs (595,262.53.) For those of you scoring at home, that equals $96,305.80 per job.

For reference, the private sector can create a job for around $31,000... one-third of what the stimulus cost the taxpayers.
http://boss.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/07/06/how-much-does-it-cost-to-create-a-job-by-encouraging-entrepreneurship/

Multiplying the 5.6 employees in the average new employer firm by the average of the percentage of businesses that have filed for unemployment insurance and F.I.C.A. (18.9) and the percentage of start-up efforts that become businesses (33), we get an estimate of 0.35 jobs created per person who begins the start-up process. At a cost of $9,000 to encourage a person to begin the start-up process, we get a cost of $25,603 per job through efforts to encourage people to become entrepreneurs.

The S.B.A.’s estimate of 5.6 employees per new employer firm is higher than the estimate of 4.6 employees per new employer firm reported by the Kauffman Firm Survey. If we use that number of employees per new employer firm, we would get a cost per job of $31,169.

Stimulus funds being spent on canceled programs
Yes, you read that correctly. Apparently, more than $3.5 billion in stimulus funds are being spent on programs that Obama either reduces or eliminates in his new budget.
http://www.usatoday.com/news/washington/2010-02-17-stimulus-funds_N.htm

More than $3.5 billion in economic stimulus funds are going to programs that President Obama wants to eliminate or trim in his new budget.

The president's budget released this month recommends getting rid of Army Corps of Engineers' drinking-water projects, which got $200 million in stimulus funds, and a U.S. Department of Agriculture flood-prevention program, which received $290 million from the stimulus, a USA TODAY review of stimulus spending reports show.

The administration's budget plan says the corps and USDA programs are inefficient and duplicate similar, more effective work by other agencies. The proposed cuts indicate the programs shouldn't have gotten money from the $862 billion stimulus package, said Tom Schatz of the non-partisan budget watchdog Citizens Against Government Waste.

"It's certainly inconsistent, and it would have been better to have this realization a year ago," Schatz said. "But if inconsistency means they're going to cut the programs, it's OK. It's the other way around that bothers us."

Alabama got $161 billion in stimulus funds
Which equates, by the way, to about $63,000 per job.
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/33498869/ns/us_news-the_stimulus_tracker/#/all/all/al/all/

So that's a little trivia about the stimulus program that you should keep in mind. It created far fewer jobs than comparable private-sector job creation could have accomplished, and they spent some of this "emergency money" on programs so inherently inefficient that PresBo is now canceling them.

Gee... thanks.