Well for my part I don't know that I would mind sending out these checks to the lucky 1.9 million, but this misconstrued analysis is the same canard that the conservatives used against Obama's 2009 stimulus.
Just how misconstrued this analysis which is making the rounds among the Right wing media is shown by quoting what actually turns out to be the meat in a particularly sparse piece.
For those eager to put some math to the rhetoric coming from the White House over the president's jobs creation plan, and that should be everyone, here is a quick and dirty estimate based on the numbers being thrown around of a 2 percent GDP increase in year 1 and 1.9 million jobs created or saved...most saved, as in those you can't really quantify. Said otherwise, roughly a $300 billion increase in GDP yields 1.9 million jobs. So far so good.
Now since the president is proposing to pay for the program over 10 years, let's assume the $475 billion in direct expenses is financed for 10 years at 2.5 percent which adds roughly $120 billion to the total cost of the program. In other words, as the calculations detailed and show below elaborate, the overall AJA plan will cost $250,000 per job created (excluding the interest expense) and $312,500 per union job created (including interest). And that's how much it costs for Obama to purchase one vote...created or saved. Keynesian efficiency strikes like a Swiss watch yet again.
http://www.cnbc.com/id/44501652
As the author, John Carney left out these detailed calculations it's hard to make heads or tails of it. What is clear is that this number per head is the wrong way to evaluate a stimulus. Indeed if it were right then his mockery of "Keynsisan efficiency" would be justified as every stimulus could be given this impressively high "cost per worker" tag to show it hasn't worked.
No comments:
Post a Comment