JOB CREATION….As word of Barack Obama’s stimulus package starts making the rounds, conservatives are reviving one of their favorite tropes: that’s sure an expensive way to put people to work! Basically, they divide $700 billion by 2.5 million jobs and announce that the cost of the plan is $280,000 per job, a whopping figure in anyone’s book. But Mark Thoma does the actual math, and it turns out that the numbers at hand are actually $490 billion and 5.4 million jobs:
If we actually get the 5 million jobs the estimates say we will get, what is the cost per job? It is $490 billion divided by 5,425,000, or $90,323. (Note that by targeting spending to places that have a high employment rate per dollar spent, we may be able to do even better than this.)
But this is GDP per job, it includes wages, rent, interest, and profit, it’s not the amount labor takes home. About 70 percent of income goes to labor….If we take 70% of $90,323, we get about $63,000 (actually, $63,226). That’s less than a quarter of the $280,000 figure.
Read the whole thing for more. I’m just presenting this as a public service, since this talking point is almost certain to get extensive play on Fox News and elsewhere. Forewarned is forearmed.
