02.17.2010
More Obama Math: Stimulus and Job Saving is Far From Reality
original article written by Net Advisor™
WASHINGTON DC. Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. defended that U.S. taxpayers have “gotten their money’s worth” out of the $787 billion stimulus program passed in 2009 (Source: MS-NBC).
Really? Let’s examine this carefully:
FACT:
The economic stimulus is all borrowed money.
“…the stimulus bill, (is) paid for with borrowed money…”
— Source: CNN
When factoring interest on the borrowed stimulus money, the Obama Stimulus will end up costing tax payers over $3.27 Trillion.
— Source: Heritage.org
FACT: Roughly $179 billion was released into the economy in 2009 (Source: MS-NBC).
We’ll ignore the fact that of that $179 billion in spent stimulus:
FACT: “$8 billion from the (stimulus) plan has been spent on increased food stamps, as the assistance program for the hungry recently reached a record enrollment of 38 million people.”
— Source: MS-NBC
I understand that we need to help others at time of need. Just keep in mind that the government has programs such as food-stamps, etc., for this need. However in this case, the Obama Administration deems feeding people as a “stimulus to the economy.”
What we have also discovered is that much of the Obama’s “economic stimulus” money is not going to create jobs or help people at all. In fact, a large chunk of the stimulus money is going to states to help with their mismanaged budgets. Thus tax payers are bailing out states across the country because politicians could not balance their budgets.
FACT: Of the entire stimulus plan, “Nearly $280 billion of the spending will be directed through state governments, including a $48 billion stabilization fund to help states balance their budgets.”
— Source: MS-NBC
Both President Obama and Vice President Biden claimed that they saved “2 million jobs” as a result of government stimulus. Let’s pretend food stamps, and helping state governments shore up their balance sheets saved or created jobs.
Even if we took the Obama Administration’s word at face value, and we really did save 2 million jobs, the cost to tax payers to save those jobs in the last year alone would be $89,500 each.
Math:
$179 billion stimulus spent (not including interest costs) divided by 2 million jobs “saved” = $89,500. This is the cost to tax payers to save one job for 1 year.Now if you count the 30,383 jobs created by way of federal contracts, at the cost of $16 billion budged for that stimulus, we are looking at a tax payer cost of $533,000 per job.
— Source: CBS News
I think it would have been cheaper to just hand out cash at the rate of $25,000 per person and then the Obama Administration could claim they “saved 10.48 million jobs” and we would have only a 2.24% unemployment again, right?
Math:
$89,500 (cost of saving one job for one year) divided by $25,000 (hand out cash instead of existing stimulus plan) would then create 3.58x more people to receive $25,000.
Let’s extrapolate this equation using Obama Math:
3.58 (the number of more people who could receive $25,000 each in direct cash payment from government stimulus program) x 2 million (jobs claimed to have “saved” by stimulus) = 7.16 million (3.58 x 2 million) jobs “saved.”
Thus, buy this Obama Math; we would then decrease unemployment by 71.6% in one year right? If unemployment is roughly estimated at 10 million people (9.3 million + 1.1 “discouraged workers”) and if unemployment rate is roughly 10%, then subtract 7.16 million jobs saved by handing out $25,000 cash each for unemployed jobs, that equals to only 2.84 million unemployed persons, giving us an unemployment rate of only 2.84%!) (10 million – 7.16 million = 2.84) or (10% unemployment rate – 7.16% rate of saved jobs = 2.84% unemployment rate).
Wow, we are in booming economic times! Keep spending and create more and more debt, and we all should be in utopia soon enough!
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