Thursday 31 May 2012

Stimulunacy cost $4.1 million per job

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All that stimulus money pouring out of the Federal Reserve, all that extra spending by the US Government over and above what they take in revenues, all that phony rhetoric from Paul Krugman and his dozy Krugman-lite acolytes about the necessity for “stimulus” … and you know what the result of it all has been?

According to the Congressional Budget Office (not exactly a hot-bed think tank of sound money and smaller govt) the American stimulus may have cost $4.1 million per job.*

Wow!  That’s $4.1 million per job with no sign of genuine recovery in sight.

To make that cost plain: realise first that any govt spending has to be paid for either through taxes, by borrowing or by inflation. In other words, it is paid for in real resources produced by private business.

So just imagine how many real jobs could have been created if the 1.9 million make-work jobs hadn’t been stimulated into existence at the cost of $4.1 million per job. And how much real recovery might have happened if nearly a trillion dollars worth of deficits had been put to real, productive use instead of pissed up against the wall in a gigantic political golden shower.

BrokenWindowsI

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* Steve Kates: “Depending on how you do the calculation, the fall in unemployment may have been as low as 0.1 percentage point and the cost per job as high as $4.1 million. If, on the other hand, you take the best outcome, the fall in unemployment was 0.8 percentage points at a cost of $540,000 per job. And if you’d like to split the difference, it’s about $2.5 million for a fall in the unemployment rate of 0.4 percentage points.”

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