Tom Knapp, in reference to the desperate defenses of the “stimulus” by Obama:
Even taking President Obama’s lowball estimate of his “stimulus” program’s cost — about $800 billion — at face value, and giving his jobs figure undue credence, those 650,000 jobs were created (or, to include his fudge, “saved”) at a cost of about $1.2 million each!
Let’s make some very rough and broad assumptions about an average job here — assumptions which I’m pretty sure will make the “stimulus” figures look better, not worse, than warranted.
Let’s assume an annual salary of $50,000 (that’s higher than the actual per capita figure), plus another $50,000 in non-salary costs — the “employer’s share” of payroll taxes, employer-sponsored insurance and bennies, the pro rata cost of running the human resources operation that hires the individual employee, etc.
That brings the cost of a single job to a nice, round $100k.
Or to put it another way, it would’ve been cheaper to just take those 650,000 people and give them each $100,000. Not to say that such a move would be particularly realistic, but hell it couldn’t be any less so — or less effective — than the policy actually taken up.
That’s the wonderful thing about mainstream political economics. Because the intent is more to look like you’re doing something than to actually accomplish anything, you can claim victory regardless. None of that messy acknowledging that corporatism has rendered the economy artificially zero-sum to worry about…
