ABC's disinformation re Cost of Jobs Created by stimulus bill.$160,000 per job? Try $80,000 or less

ON Friday Oct 30, ABC News (ABC is owned by Disney) did it's part as part of the Rights Echo-chamber in misrepresenting the effectiveness and cost of President Obama's stimulus package.

They were reporting on the news out Friday that the economy had actually GROWN 3.5% in the third quarter. This actually is news worth celebrating. This was a greater rate of growth in GDP than most economists had expected, given the magnitude of the Economic Destruction wrought by the Republican DEREGULATION DISASTER which brought the World's economy to the brink of the Second Great Depression. But ABC, like the rest of the Right's Media Echo chamber had to find some way to present this very positive news in as negative a light as possible, even if they had to create a fallacious statistic to it.


ABC's Jake Tapper turned this report into a down-beat message focusing on how the number of job created was not that great (echoing the sentiment of John Boehner, of 'the Party of NO' (who also said: "but where's the jobs?"). But Mssrs Boehner and Tapper express disdain at the stimulus results EVEN THOUGH EVERY ECONOMIC SCHOOL OF THOUGHT ASSERTS AND EVERY ECONOMIST IN THE KNOWN WORLD HAS SAID THAT WHEN RECOVERING FROM A RECESSION JOB GROWTH ALWAYS FOLLOWS AN UPTURN IN ECONOMIC GROWTH (GROWTH IN GDP) BY SEVERAL MONTHS. So ABCs SUGGESTION that the stimulus is a disappointment and not working is patent GOP PROPAGANDA.

Tapper focused on the jobs number and said that the cost per job created was $160,000 per job based on dividing the 1,000,000 direct and indirect jobs (that the administration said were created) by $160 billion "allocated for stimulus jobs as of the end of September". But 'Allocated' is a long way from committed to projects by states - and ABC knows that. Looking at the Recovery.com website: (http://www.recovery.com/home.aspx ) which was set up by the Obama administration so citizens could track dollars spent under the Recovery program you can see that the estimated total value (at completion) of projects under way is $116 Billion.

But if you click on the "for Taspayers" tab and then click on "Graphs: Spending by Program for Each State" you can look at money actually spent on jobs by state and then click on "Graphs: Estimated Jobs Created by State" to see jobs created in each state - estimated by the states (not the Obama administration).

I looked at seven states and put the results in the spreadsheeet at the link below. I used the seven states as basis for an estimate of actual costs in stimulus money for each job created (including indirect jobs) and calculated it on an annual basis. The jobs figures are based on hours expected to be worked in a quarter (because these projects are all of varying lengths) to obtain equivalent full time jobs for a quarter. I multipied these quarterly numbers by 4 to arrive at a cost for a full year of full time work. This results in the cost to create a full time job for a full year to be about $80,000 which is half ABCs number. (note that the actual job may not cost that much because the project may not last a full year. But to evaluate the cost for a years worth of work it was necessary to convert the cost for a quarterly full time job to an annual full-time job).

Note that this figure also includes money spent on raw materials and amortized cost of equipment used for construction jobs, so it's not ALL for labor. The actual figure for labor may be something like $50,000 per job. That's a very reasonable figure. But at any rate, even my number of $80,000 (without adjusting for raw materials and equipment costs) is HALF the ABC news number.

http://spreadsheets.google.com/ccc?key=0AgV4uC-m_q4odHpZcng4ZnNTUVRoQ3NBSjIzXzNvNHc&hl=en


IF you are going to come up with a statistic ABC, you should try to come up with a legitimate number. But then, if your in the business of disinformation ,who wants a legitimate number, RIGHT?

Jake Tapper finished his bit of bull-shit by saying the stimulus was supposed to create jobs "but at $160,000 a job...at what cost?". Well, your number was double what it really is, but even so, ABC, what would have been the cost of doing nothing? What cost would a Great Depression II be? How do you cost out 20% unemployment?

Actually, I would say the stimulus did MORE than what these numbers show. Without the stimulus, businesses would have 'tightened-up' even more than they have and laid off even more people and we would have been in much worse shape than just an additional million jobs lost. I'll bet it would have been much worse. Actually, The White HOuse is being quite conservative in just counting the jobs the states can point to as paid for by the stimulus package (plus the indirect jobs created). Things would have been far worse without the stimulus bill.

In each state and send the states the money, proportionate to their population. With strict stipulations that each state must use the money to first keep people in their jobs from being laid off.

As it is, the erroneously named stimulus bill offers:

1) Thirty three percent of its monies went for tax cuts for the richest Americans
2) Construction, especially road construction, tends to be the very most corrupt employer out there. (Witness the recent San Francisco Bay Bridge failure - this was a new, 6 billion dollar plus construction project that failed!) Construction, especially road construction, often ends up employing people here illegally. Construction tends to force those Americans it does hire to be indie contractors - and thus not eligible for benefits.
2) How many laid off teachers, fire fighters, police, social workers, child protection agents, project managers, environmental specialists etc will be employed? Will a fifty one year old laid off social worker be able to go out and get a job building a road or a bridge? The fact that it is construction related means that it is very age discriminatory - and the 48 year olds and up are the ones along with the younger crowd, are having the hardest time out there getting jobs.

the richest americans. I hadn't heard that. Got any links or documentation. I'm interested.


Yes, tax cuts are not stimulative of job growth. But that was the price of getting some REpublican votes.

Regarding your obsservations on construction, alas If Obama were Jesus Christ he could deliver salvation to humans and change society with a wave of his hand while repairing our economic wounds. But, methinks he's not a God. So I guess we'll have to put up with his mortal limitations.

addording to article here: (http://tpmdc.talkingpointsmemo.com/2009/10/vp-biden-schwarzenegger-laud-jobs-saved-with-stimulus-cash.php ) of 400,000 detailed, 80,000 are construction workers, 325,000 are education workers.


In California, 62,000 teachers were kept employed instead of being laid off.

Is indeed praise worthy.

But one does wonder, at least a little bit, how it costs $ 80,000 for each teacher to keep their job? What bureaucracy and where is reaping that money?

by my calculations. As I stated in OP these figures include the cost of materials and amortized cost of equipment for construction projects. These figures are not just for labor. My guess is California had some construction projects too.

In my County. You have to drive into Napa County to have a construction job related to the stim bill,

The Napa project is a decent one - involving water pumping to help that city avoid floods. Very needed. But not even helpful to most in cosntruction industry - you have to know about specialized equipment relating to water pumps.

what county you're in or how far you are willing to go but they seem to be all over the state:


http://www.recovery.gov/Pages/TextView.aspx?data=stateSummaryAllIR&statecode=CA

Napa County is the closest and they only had the pumps.

This morning, CNN was running a story that part of the stimulus program was costing $272,000 per job. I didn't catch which part. The newscasters said it shows how hard it is for the government to create jobs.

If it was a construction project, that could make sense because of the costs of materials, etc.

http://wonkroom.thinkprogress.org/2009/01/26/conservative-myth/


Conservatives Peddle Myth That Stimulus Spends $275,000 For Every Job Created


In staking out their opposition to the economic recovery package, conservatives have been peddling a variety of myths. One of their favorites is that taxpayers will pay $275,000 for every new job:

Rep. John Boehner (R-OH): All told, the plan would spend a whopping $275,000 in taxpayer dollars for every new job it aims to create, saddling each and every household with $6,700 in additional debt.

Rep. Jerry Lewis (R-CA): his bill will spend a shocking $275,000 for each new job created (assuming they actually materialize). Even worse, this calculation is only a partial measure of cost…It is more than likely the private sector could have created more than one job for $275,000 – especially considering the average U.S. household income is around $45,000.

Today, Paul Krugman broke down this “bogus talking point“:

t involves taking the cost of a plan that will extend over several years, creating millions of jobs each year, and dividing it by the jobs created in just one of those years. It’s as if an opponent of the school lunch program were to take an estimate of the cost of that program over the next five years, then divide it by the number of lunches provided in just one of those years, and assert that the program was hugely wasteful, because it cost $13 per lunch.

Joe Klein called the number “phony-baloney propaganda,” while Dean Baker noted that “the media have been typically derelict in simply reporting this number without making any assessment to evaluate it.”

As Scott Lilly pointed out, the actual cost per job is closer to $50,000, without taking into account the “substantial number of additional jobs beyond 2012.” And even if the conservatives’ number was anywhere close to accurate, their proposed job creation program — tax cuts — would cost more than three times as much per job. As Christian Weller and John Halpin found, “even under the most optimistic assumptions about the relationship between tax cuts and jobs,” President Bush’s 2001 tax cut cost $871,000 for every job created.

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I highlighted Lilly's number (which I was not aware of until just now) of $50,000 as that is the same number I mentioned in the OP:

"Note that this figure also includes money spent on raw materials and amortized cost of equipment used for construction jobs, so it's not ALL for labor. The actual figure for labor may be something like $50,000 per job. That's a very reasonable figure."


Thanks for making us aware of this shit by CNN.