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

[JohnWxy]

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.