The Failure of Recovery

As of October 10th over 30k jobs have been created or saved thanks to federal contracts granted by the 2009 Recovery and Reinvestment Act. That amounts to an average of 600 jobs per state with approximately $2.2 billion of just over $16 billion having been spent so far. But what does this mean to taxpayers? Well simply going by the averages here, that amounts to over 70k dollars per job created or saved. Below is a chart which shows the average medium income in the United States for people aged 25 and over. This should give people an idea of the scope of the costs for a single job.

The entire 787 billion dollars in stimulus funding of which only 18% has been spent means that the burden on taxpayers is increasing as more and more jobs are lost. Considering there are close to 25 million Americans who are either unemployed or working part time you start to see the immense costs for even a partial recovery of jobs in the United States. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, since 2007 over 7 million jobs have been lost, 3.3 million of which were lost during the new administration and congress.

* February: -651,000
* March: -663,000
* April: -539,000
* May: -303,000
* June: -443,000
* July: -247,000
* August: -216,000
* September: -263,000

In all fairness, job creation or job losses cannot be entirely pinned on the stimulus spending over the last 8 months nor president Obama's economic policy. Matter of fact, so little has been spent already it can hardly be called a stimulus. But one thing that is becoming increasingly clear is the fact that tax revenue continues to shrink, government continues to spend and a minimum of 100k jobs per month will continue well into 2010. If the stimulus is saving jobs it is barely being felt and perhaps a free market non interventionist policy could do greater good than direct intervention by political interferences. No government bureaucrat can convince a majority of Americans with any certainty that spending ourselves into further debt is the answer.