House of Eratosthenes

It is generally accepted that it costs somewhere in the range of $120,000 to $150,000 for the private sector – that’s the evil capitalist, free enterprise sector – to create one job. This covers not only the salary that will be paid to the new worker, but to investments in space, materials, equipment, marketing efforts and other costs associated with job creation.

OK … that’s the private sector. But since we have a president – for now, at least – who thinks that it is the government’s responsibility to create jobs, let’s look into THOSE numbers for a few minutes…
:
Under Obama’s stimulus bill – actually written by Nancy Pelosi – it cost anywhere from $540,000 to $4,100,000 for each job created. The private sector does this for $120,000 to $150,000 … but for government the cost is, at best, four times that … and up …. Way up. If you just go for the median you’re spending over $3 million for each job produced.

Um, no. The number of jobs estimated to have been created only include those in the first quarter of calendar year 2012, but Boortz is using the cost of the entire stimulus. According to the CBO, most of the stimulatory effect occurred in 2010, and only residual effects are being felt today.
http://www.cbo.gov/sites/default/files/cbofiles/attachments/05-25-Impact_of_ARRA.pdf
- Zachriel | 05/31/2012 @ 08:41
The source article for Neal’s remarks is, from what I can figure out, here. It points to the same CBO report offered up by our construct-identity we-this we-that friend…

Who else wants to take the trouble to identify the obvious breakdown in logic here. It’s completely obvious once you briefly look over Pethokoukis Table 1. And, throughout 300 or 400 comments, or more, he/she/they/it won’t acknowledge it of course…anyone else up for a repeat of this surreal experience?
- mkfreeberg | 05/31/2012 @ 08:54
In the first year of the Obummer, one of his inner acolytes exitedly informed the network news that each dollar of government spending created one dollar and fifty cents of economic activity. Oddly, this formula was not known to the Bush administration. It occured to me straightaway that if only the Founders had understod this brilliant line of reasoning we could have saved ourselves two centuries of toil and trouble.

It is no longer possible to measure what a dollar of government costs. Certainly it is not a dollar. A dollar is not so much wasted as it is employed to do as much harm as possible. There is no calculating what that cost is, economically and socially.
- xlibrl | 05/31/2012 @ 09:51
Well we’ve certainly learned what it cost to lose jobs. Check the deficit for the answer.

How Much Does it Cost to Create a Job?

I guess it depends what the cost of gas is where you live, the MPG your vehicle gets and how far your voting booth is come this November.

I predict as soon as it looks like Romney is going to win (August/Sept.) the jobs will start flowing. The exact opposite when Barry was poised to take over. Mark it down.
- tim | 05/31/2012 @ 13:28
tim,

yup. And that’s also about the time that:

— the high (and rising!) cost of gas becomes nightly news fodder

— jobs figures stop “unexpectedly” getting revised down and become predictably anemic

— the media finally realizes we’re in a depression

— young moms with telegenic waifs who can’t find work start getting interspersed with the rising gas cost stories

etc. etc. etc.

Anyone who has been conscious the last four years and still maintains there’s no liberal media bias is flat-out insane, or so in-the-tank partisan as to be virtually the same thing.

[Oh, and Morgan: While I’m not up for a repeat of the 400+ post marathon, I will say that I owe our collective friends a bit of thanks for a nice trip down memory lane. I finally realized I was your typical partisan liberal dumbass when I noticed I was never, ever wrong about anything. Every single fact I ever encountered just happened to exactly fit whatever my off-the-cuff, ass-pulled opinion of the moment was. I was an insufferable douche-widget, but damn did it feel good to always always always be so very, very correct about everything. Sigh].
- Severian | 05/31/2012 @ 15:23
Yeah, I hear that. Reality has a way of firming up as we get older, and starting out all pliable & bendy when we’re, uh…not as “seasoned.”

Kinda like the opposite of the old joke about the two old guys in the park. You’ve heard it…one of them is eighty, he says when I was twenty I could grab my, uh, manhood…in two hands…try to bend it with all my might, and not be able to do it. When I was forty I could bend it a little bit, when I was sixty I could bend it all around, now I can flop it in any ol’ direction.

(Pause for comedic effect)

I’m not sure how much stronger I’m a-gonna get…
- mkfreeberg | 05/31/2012 @ 15:35
I love it!! That’s the liberal worldview in a nutshell. In fact, that’s one of two* infallible litmus tests to see if your interlocutor is a liberal — when confronted with a fact that doesn’t fit his narrative, he’ll immediately come back with “yeah, but what that really means is….” Like the pensioner who can flop it in any ol’ direction, it’s not that his facts are weak and flaccid, it’s that his verbal jiu-jitsu is just that strong.

*the other one being “ability to admit one’s ignorance about anything of consequence.” Just as a liberal is never wrong — he just sees some higher plane of reality you don’t have access to — so no liberal is ever without the germane knowledge. If refuting a Republican somehow required a detailed knowledge of the mating habits of the bonobo chimp and the correct calculations of stellar parallaxes, you’d find that every liberal in creation was suddenly a zoologist and an astrophysicist. Because they’re just. that. smart.
- Severian | 05/31/2012 @ 16:01
mkfreeberg: The source article for Neal’s remarks is, from what I can figure out

Per CBO, estimated full-time equivalent jobs, by quarter:

1st 2012, 160000
4th 2011, 200000
3rd 2011, 400000
2nd 2011, 550000
1st 2011, 571000
4th 2010, 580000
3rd 2010, 670000
2nd 2010, 750000
1st 2010, 700000
4th 2009, 580000
through 3rd 2009, 640000 (total jobs)

In other words, Boortz divided apples by oranges to arrive at his number. Never fear! Accuracy is not necessary for its propagation through the right-wing blogosphere.
- Zachriel | 06/01/2012 @ 06:33
I hear ya’, Severian, but then again there’s a reason the NY Times, CNN and the rest have such shitty subscribership/viewership.

Plus even with all that, Romney is doing pretty well, if the polls can be believed. (Personally, I don’t trust the polls, I think he’s doing better and they’re trying to make it look closer than it actually is.)

The average voter (key word, people polled don’t necessarily vote) is smarter than we give them credit for. When they have a brother and a cousin AND an Uncle out of work AND their friends the same, and the unemployment number is at the ridiculously low number, they now something isn’t right.

Same, same when Barry goes on TV to tell everyone how he such a fiscal hawk. They know better.

Having said all that, if the Romney camp can’t manage effectively point out all the Obama flatulence that’s been stinking up the joint…shame on him.

Is the media capable of manipulated some voters, sure. All/most of them, no. See Bush in 2000 and 2004.

BTW, see also, the 2010 midterms. Everyone always forgets that.
- tim | 06/01/2012 @ 06:36
Never fear! Accuracy is not necessary for its propagation through the right-wing blogosphere.

Actually, if I understand your quibble it is not with “accuracy,” it’s with the way things are counted. You want this job creation event to work as a cumulative process…to work like a subway turn-style. Joe construction worker gets hired to help widen some backroads, three times, and is laid off three times, then he’s hired a fourth time and still has a job at the very end of it thanks to the brilliance of Obamastruction.

You want that to count four times to make Obama look good.

Meanwhile, at the end of it CBO says between “0.2 million and 1.5 million” people are employed, like Joe the construction worker…thanks to the Reinvestment Act…they moneys of which, we only got to spend one time. We did not get the money back to spend four times on Joe. So, to take the one job Joe has, and divide it into the money that was spent…your babbling about “accuracy” notwithstanding, that’s a fair thing to do.

We spent X much money, Y people (we think) have jobs as a result. X/Y=Z.
- mkfreeberg | 06/01/2012 @ 08:49
You’re surprised by the turnstile counting? It’s just about the same process we were asked to accept when it came to co2 levels.
- nightfly | 06/01/2012 @ 09:33
Sorry, read the wrong column. Per CBO, estimated millions of full-time equivalent jobs, by quarter, midpoint of range:

1st 2012, 1.1
4th 2011, 1.5
3rd 2011, 1.9
2nd 2011, 2.7
1st 2011, 3.1
4th 2010, 3.4
3rd 2010, 3.6
2nd 2010, 3.4
1st 2010, 2.9
4th 2009, 2.2

mkfreeberg: You want this job creation event to work as a cumulative process…to work like a subway turn-style.

That’s an accumulated 25.85 million job-quarters, or 6.46 million job-years. The total cost of the stimulus was $831 billion. That works out to about $130,000 per job-year.
- Zachriel | 06/01/2012 @ 13:02
Um, no. The number of jobs estimated to have been created only include those in the first quarter of calendar year 2012, but Boortz is using the cost of the entire stimulus. According to the CBO, most of the stimulatory effect occurred in 2010, and only residual effects are being felt today.

Whatever you say, comrade. Never mind that the stimulus can’t actually be credited for “saving or creating” one single permanent job, especially when you consider the net effect of how many more jobs would have been created in the private sector with the money the government took from it (or borrowed from China.) I don’t know why you liberal types don’t seem to “get” that government cannot and does not create employment, never mind that it shouldn’t be trying to do so in the first place.

By the way, not to kick a sleeping dog, but you’re STILL wrong on that whole Gore-bal warming thing:

http://www.forbes.com/sites/larrybell/2012/05/29/global-warming-alarmism-when-science-is-fiction/
- cylarz | 06/03/2012 @ 00:38
Oh…and you’ve seen THIS chart, correct? http://hotair.com/archives/2012/05/24/how-to-make-obamas-spending-look-small-marketwatch-rebuttal-infographic/
- cylarz | 06/03/2012 @ 01:24
Maybe I should link to that chart fifty times, after Zachariel protests that it doesn’t prove anything.

What do you think, guys? Sev? Morgan? Does linking to a chart make it more credible, if it’s linked to over and over and over? Look at it AGAIN, will you? It’s all right there!

Our friend here seems to think so.
- cylarz | 06/03/2012 @ 01:26
cylarz: Never mind that the stimulus can’t actually be credited for “saving or creating” one single permanent job,

We used the same source as Boortz.
- Zachriel | 06/03/2012 @ 04:59
It is a remarkable conceit of the leftists that he lives under the delusion that accuracy and reason are his strong suits. That is why he is immune to argument or experience when, for an adult, the only way to learn something is by realizing you have been wrong. That experience may be enlightening or it may be humbling, but the leftists cannot accept experience or he would not be a leftists. Experience is something to be imposed on others.

He is necessarily clever but not creative as he piles one mistake on another in the attempt to fill the void he has created in his own mind, and his only satisfaction comes from imposing his void in other minds as well. The book is still out on whether the global warming hoax will ultimately create more drones or more conservatives, but it goes without saying that Zachriel is a hoaxer who sees it is prudent to go silent on the last hoax and press on with others.
- xlibrl | 06/03/2012 @ 10:36

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How Much Does it Cost to Create a Job?Thursday, May 31st, 2012

How Much Does it Cost to Create a Job?
Thursday, May 31st, 2012