Jobs Bill Alternate Wisdom

Let’s do the numbers.  Obama’s job bill costs $475,000,000,000.00 dollars.  The plan claims to create (or save) 2.5M jobs. First off, notice the “or save” part of the claim.  That’s the same rhetoric used with the first stimulus, however the credibility of such counterfactual claims is well known to have more psychological value than logical merit. Claiming knowledge of a history that didn’t occur or a future that hasn’t yet occurred is particularly offensive to the rational mind.

In fact, Stimulus 1.0 created nothing, regardless of vacuous claims of what it caused to not happen.  Well, let’s be picky.  Yes, it created jobs – just about the same number that were lost.  So, one side gets to say “created jobs” while the other side “didn’t create jobs.”  You figure out who is telling the truth.

Back to the $4.5B.  Using numbers from Bill Spetrino’s recent musings, we can go further.  The $4.5B will be spent now, but paid back over 10 years.  Add in another $120B in interest.  Then do the division.  The cost is $190,000.00 per job.  But remember, about half of those are “saved” jobs, not “created” jobs. That pushes the cost per job up to $380,000.00 per job.

Instead, let’s spend the $380,000 per job differently. Give a $40,000 tax credit to any company that hires someone for 5 years. Suddenly, you get nearly 12M jobs created (not shell-game “jobs saved” or transient seasonal job), and huge tax revenue.  Food stamp and Medicare costs go down. Unemployment down to 4%.

What’s really going on becomes so clear…