Obama Math: $224,857 per job saved or created

How much did Obama’s two million jobs cost?

By Klaus Rohrich
Tuesday, February 23, 2010

Last week on the anniversary of the enactment of the Obama stimulus bill, the president bragged about having saved or created some 2 million jobs thus far and said that the stimulus was on target to create or save 1.5 million more jobs, bringing up the estimated total to 3.5 million jobs saved or created.

Aside from the fact that Obama’s claim is meaningless, as it is impossible to verify, let’s give the president the benefit of the doubt and for argument’s sake agree that the $787 billion stimulus bill will ultimately save or create 3.5 million jobs. As I wrote in these pages last week, math isn’t the Democrats’ strong suit. Dividing that $787 billion spent by 3.5 million jobs leaves us with an astounding $224,857 per job saved or created.

From any perspective that seems to be a heavy price to pay per job, given that the average annual per capita income is somewhere just north of $40,000. Here’s an example of the government taking a dollar and turning it into 20¢, given that the amount the government has/will spend is just over five times more per job than what the average American earns. It’s a prime example of why government does not create wealth but rather impedes the creation of wealth.

The president could have been much more effective had he taken that $787 billion and broken it up into lots of $30,000 each, and randomly passed it out to 24.5 million Americans. Imagine what kind of economic activity would have resulted from over 20 million people with an extra $30,000 to spend. Certainly, that would have stimulated the economy a lot more than filtering the cash through countless layers of bureaucracy. But it’s the sort of program that shows the sharp philosophical divide between the Left and the Right in America.

The President and his minions on the left are all in favor of taking money away from “the richâ€