ABC News reports:
Posting its results late this afternoon at Recovery.gov, the White House claimed 640,329 jobs have been created or saved because of the $159 billion in stimulus funds allocated as of Sept. 30.
Officials acknowledged the numbers were not exact, saying that states and localities that reported the numbers have made mistakes. . .
The White House argues that the actual job number is actually larger than 640,000 — closer to 1 million jobs when one factors in stimulus jobs added in October and, more importantly, jobs created indirectly, such as “the waitress who’s still on the job,” Vice President Biden said today.
So let’s see. Assuming their number is right — 160 billion divided by 1 million. Does that mean the stimulus costs taxpayers $160,000 per job?
Jared Bernstein, chief economist and senior economic advisor to the vice president, called that “calculator abuse.”
“Calculator abuse”? That’s all they’ve got?
POSTSCRIPT: By the way, I’m reminded of an incident from 2003 in which Paul Krugman tried to do a similar calculation for President Bush’s tax cuts. But unlike ABC, Krugman didn’t do the calculation honestly. Krugman took a ten-year cost figure, divided it by the number of jobs that were projected to be created (none of this “jobs saved” nonsense) within the first year, and presented that meaningless quotient as if it were the annual cost per job.
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