$275,000 Per Job Created

$275,000 Per Job Created

Samizdata makes an interesting point about the cost of the stimulus package--that even if we assume that Obama is right--and this $820 billion stimulus package creates three million jobs--that comes to just under $275,000 per job created.

What if we took that half of that money--say $400 billion, and distributed it as targeted tax credits (for new home purchases, new car purchases, new appliances--not including consumer electronics which is mostly made abroad)? If thirty million Americans took advantage of this, and spent an average of $13,333 each buying houses, cars, refrigerators, washing machines--do you think that would liven up the economy a bit?

Would that years to take effect, or months? I think you know the answer. But that would help thirty million ordinary Americans--not a carefully selected group of Americans who have political connections that will enable them to benefit from the stimulus.

I'm not persuaded that a stimulus package is actually needed, so much as the government getting out of the way, and allowing the creative destruction of a bust to finish. But even if you buy into the Keynesian notion of spending our way out of a recession, there are smarter ways of doing it than this absurdity.

One of Charles Krauthammer's better columns is this one in the February 6, 2009 Washington Post, which I encourage you to click over to and read in full:

"A failure to act, and act now, will turn crisis into a catastrophe."
-- President Obama, Feb. 4.
Catastrophe, mind you. So much for the president who in his inaugural address two weeks earlier declared "we have chosen hope over fear." Until, that is, you need fear to pass a bill.
...
It's not just pages and pages of special-interest tax breaks, giveaways and protections, one of which would set off a ruinous Smoot-Hawley trade war. It's not just the waste, such as the $88.6 million for new construction for Milwaukee Public Schools, which, reports the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, have shrinking enrollment, 15 vacant schools and, quite logically, no plans for new construction.
It's the essential fraud of rushing through a bill in which the normal rules (committee hearings, finding revenue to pay for the programs) are suspended on the grounds that a national emergency requires an immediate job-creating stimulus -- and then throwing into it hundreds of billions that have nothing to do with stimulus, that Congress's own budget office says won't be spent until 2011 and beyond, and that are little more than the back-scratching, special-interest, lobby-driven parochialism that Obama came to Washington to abolish. He said.
Not just to abolish but to create something new -- a new politics where the moneyed pork-barreling and corrupt logrolling of the past would give way to a bottom-up, grass-roots participatory democracy. That is what made Obama so dazzling and new. Turns out the "fierce urgency of now" includes $150 million for livestock (and honeybee and farm-raised fish) insurance.
The Age of Obama begins with perhaps the greatest frenzy of old-politics influence peddling ever seen in Washington. By the time the stimulus bill reached the Senate, reports the Wall Street Journal, pharmaceutical and high-tech companies were lobbying furiously for a new plan to repatriate overseas profits that would yield major tax savings. California wine growers and Florida citrus producers were fighting to change a single phrase in one provision. Substituting "planted" for "ready to market" would mean a windfall garnered from a new "bonus depreciation" incentive.
After Obama's miraculous 2008 presidential campaign, it was clear that at some point the magical mystery tour would have to end. The nation would rub its eyes and begin to emerge from its reverie. The hallucinatory Obama would give way to the mere mortal. The great ethical transformations promised would be seen as a fairy tale that all presidents tell -- and that this president told better than anyone.
I thought the awakening would take six months. It took two and a half weeks.

Do you remember when Democrats complained that Bush was running up deficits?