Yeah, we knew that already. It's kind of new old news in that sense. Before the stimulus boondoggle passed, Obama promised it would create 3.5 million jobs. Instead 3.5 million have been lost. And the rhetoric went from 'creating jobs' before the boondoggle, to 'created and saved jobs' afterwards. It's hard to claim you created jobs when the jobs numbers actually tanked. I've written several times on the failure of porkulus:
Note that the blue lines are the numbers that Obama's team came up with. So the actual unemployment rate is not only worse that what would happen with porkulus, but even worse than was predicted without it. Here's Obama in his own words regarding the stimulus bill:
Almost 2 years later, the unemployment rate is 9.8% and has been above 9.5% for 16 straight months.
- Counterfactual: Obama's claim of creating or saving 3 million jobs can't be proven, but here's proof the stimulus failed - Part 1
- Counterfactual: Obama's claim of creating or saving 3 million jobs can't be proven, but here's proof the stimulus failed - Part 2
Via Reason, the economists at e21 take a long look at a new study by Daniel Wilson at the San Francisco Fed on the effect on employment from the Obama administration's stimulus plan, which indicates that the impact was a lot less than advertised. Instead of adding two million jobs to the economy, the Fed finds that any new jobs added had disappeared by August of this year (via The American Thinker):We were told that the unemployment would peak at 8%, but this is the pathetic result instead (via Michael's Comments):It is difficult to properly calculate the effects of the 2009 ARRA bill, as it was a nation-wide program. Though employment and growth failed to respond to ARRA as the Administration had suggested, fiscal stimulus advocates have argued that employment levels would have been lower still without the program.
Wilson's study makes an important contribution to this debate by focusing on state-by-state comparisons. A large portion of stimulus funding at the state level was based on criteria that were entirely independent of the economic situation that states faced. For example, the number of existing highway miles was used to calculate additional transportation spending.
The study uses this resulting variation in state-level stimulus funding to determine what impact ARRA funding had on employment — including both the direct impact of workers hired to complete planned projects, as well as any broader spillover effects resulting from greater government spending. Administration economists have repeatedly emphasized the importance of this indirect employment growth in driving economic recovery.
The results suggest that though the program did result in 2 million jobs "created or saved" by March 2010, net job creation was statistically indistinguishable from zero by August of this year. Taken at face value, this would suggest that the stimulus program (with an overall cost of $814 billion) worked only to generate temporary jobs at a cost of over $400,000 per worker. Even if the stimulus had in fact generated this level of employment as a durable outcome, it would still have been an extremely expensive way to generate employment.
Almost 2 years later, the unemployment rate is 9.8% and has been above 9.5% for 16 straight months.
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