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Name:
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Jim Dandy
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Subject:
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$350M for STD-Econ Stimulus???
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Date:
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1/28/2009 3:54:53 PM
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If the first post wasn't enough, then here is another.....
House Democrats propose to spend $550 billion of their two-year, $825 billion "stimulus bill" (the rest of it being tax cuts). Most of the spending is unlikely to be timely or temporary. Strangely, most of it is targeted toward sectors of the economy where unemployment is the lowest.
The December unemployment rate was only 2.3% for government workers and 3.8% in education and health. Unemployment rates in manufacturing and construction, by contrast, were 8.3% and 15.2% respectively. Yet 39% of the $550 billion in the bill would go to state and local governments. Another 17.3% would go to health and education -- sectors where relatively secure government jobs are also prevalent.
If the intent of the plan is to alleviate unemployment, why spend over half of the money on sectors where unemployment is lowest? Another 22.5% of the $550 billion would go to social programs, such as expanding food stamps and extending benefits for the unemployed and subsidizing their health insurance.
After subtracting what House Democrats hope to spend on government payrolls, health, education and welfare, only a fifth of the original $550 billion is left for notoriously slow infrastructure projects, such as rebuilding highways and the electricity grid.
The Obama administration claims the stimulus bill will "create or save three or four million jobs over the next two years . . . with over 90% [of those jobs] in the private sector." To prove it, they issued a report from Christina Romer, chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers, and Jared Bernstein, chief economic adviser to Vice President Joe Biden. Its key estimates, however, were simply lifted from an outdated paper by Mark Zandi of Moody's economy.com.
Mr. Zandi's current estimates have government employment growing by 330,400 over two years as a result of the House bill (compared with 244,000 in Bernstein-Romer paper). Yet even that updated figure still amounts to only 8.3% of total jobs added, even though state and local governments are to receive 39% of the funds ($214.5 billion). Spending $214.5 billion to create or save 330,400 government jobs implies that taxpayers are being asked to spend $646,214 per job.
Does that make sense?
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