CBO report: Stimulus package saved or created as many as 1.6 million jobs

[BREMPRO]

Source: The Hill

The stimulus bill enacted this year has resulted in as many as 1.6 million jobs saved or created this fall, the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) said Monday evening.

The nonpartisan CBO said in a legally mandated report that the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA) had resulted in between 600,000 and 1.6 million jobs for the U.S. economy that wouldn't have existed in the absence of the stimulus.

Additionally, the CBO said, gross domestic product (GDP) was as much as 3.2 percent higher than it would have been in the absence of the stimulus.
<snip>

The CBO said that the White House's model for analyzing the stimulus was not comprehensive, and that its own analysis provided the best look at the impact of the stimulus so far.



Read more: http://thehill.com/blogs/blog-briefing-room/news/69923-cbo-stimulus-saved-or-created-as-many-as-16m-jobs

---

so the stimulus was even more effective the White House estimated. They can't get anything right!

[Cant trust em]

1. between 600K and 1.6M

That is quite a gap.

[Zavulon]

24. Exactly.

I'd be willing to bet that the low end of this spin control is higher than the actual number, too.

[Cant trust em]

26. It's a CBO number though. They're non-partisan.

They certainly have been during the health care debate.

[Zavulon]

28. My first thought about the CBO is

perfectly reflected in your rather ingenious username in this instance, because I believe they're trying to quantify an unquantifiable number. Previous estimates have been laughably wrong.

[Cant trust em]

29. I do agree that these jobs are tough to count, but I don't believe that they're intent is to spin.

[Zavulon]

31. You might be right.

If you know of any source that measures the CBO's performance in terms of accuracy and it turns out that they can be proven to be good at such estimates, I'm not open to admitting I'm wrong. Unfortunately, 46 years of bitter experience has me on "mistrust" as my default setting.

[No Elephants]

46. I don't know of anyone who is non-partisan these days. Maybe it is SUPPOSED to be

non-partisan. Doesn't mean that it actually is, though.

[iandhr]

2. How do you calculate a "saved" job...

.. No one has really described this. Can some one help me out?

[dmallind]

3. well think of it this way

Assume you're a local or state legislator who has to close a $500MM budget gap. Your biggest expenses are on labor, human services and education, so you look at your painful choices and decide you have to put a hiring freeze on all state agencies, and cut the music and arts curriculum and save on the teachers.

Then the FEd all of a sudden says you can have some of that $500mm from us. You ease up on hiring freezes at the DMV and get another desk clerk (created job) and you keep funding Mrs. Johnson's music class (saved job).

[iandhr]

4. understood

[Zynx]

5. There are two ways.

One is mechanical, by which I mean the grants to states and local governments plugged holes that would have necessarily been taken care of through spending cuts or tax increases. You can look at what governors' proposed budgets were prior to the stimulus, figure out how many FTE positions would have been eliminated, and figure out how many of those didn't happen as a result.

The other way is by looking at the overall macroeconomic output generated by the stimulus. This is difficult to calculate, but there are a number of methods for doing so. The additional macroeconomic output produced, or at least the decline prevented, can be approximated into a requisite number of jobs. Say the economy in the second and third quarters would have shrunk 3.5% on an annualized basis. Let's just say for the sake of argument that the stimulus only took GDP to the flat line over those two quarters. You can calculate, based on a large number of different models for this, how many jobs would have been lost had GDP fallen by 3.5% on an annualized basis. To the extent you prevented that, you have saved jobs.

[Name removed]

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[Lochloosa]

11. Mine. Without the stimulus money I would be unemployed. Period.

[MidwestRick]

12. What will happen

to your job when the stimulus money runs out?

[Lochloosa]

13. It will still be here. I'm seeing those "green shoots" regardless what some say.

Construction is a tough field right now but it is moving in the right direction.

[MidwestRick]

18. Good to hear

Right now I am in the process of starting up a "green" buisness to recruit architects, engineers and executives for companies in the renewable energy and sustainable design world. I have been a headhunter for years (automotive engineering), but with all of the new jobs and companies starting up in the area, I hope to be on the front end of the true green jobs in our country.

[Zavulon]

25. I cancel you out.

I'm now unemployed because my employer had to cut staff to afford new expenses associated with the so-called "stimulus," one of which required him to kick in more for unemployment. If not for the so-called "stimulus," I'd still have a job.

[Psephos]

30. whoa, that sucks n/t

[Zavulon]

32. It happens. Chances are that even without

the stimulus, I was on my way out in a few months anyway, maybe as early as the end of the year, because the economy was kicking the shit out of us. The stimulus only hastened it.

Want to hear the really sad part? I'm first in line to get my job back (I wasn't the only one let go), but a lot of it depends on the health care bill. If any of the current versions pass, I have no hope, my employer won't be hiring anyone else unless he has to replace current staff. Isn't that just perfect? Instead of being all for some sort of health care reform, I have to root for the bills to die in order to get that job back. At the same time, I want reform (although admittedly not the versions currently being proposed).

This is exactly like having your best fantasy football player going against your favorite team in real life. You want good fortune on both sides (your favorite team wins, your fantasy player scores 5 TDs), but the chances of you getting everything you want are next to none.

Life really blows goat sometimes.

[jpak]

21. Let's see - if my state was about to lay off 3000 teachers and the stimulus was used

to keep those 3000 teachers on the job.

then those would be "saved jobs"

see?

[winyanstaz]

8. so if they have spent less than half....

How can they claim that number of jobs were saved? Obviously someones numbers are off.

[no limit]

10. Up to this point

[winyanstaz]

14. agreed...but still that makes the numbers wrong...

as if they have not spent half the money yet...those jobs dont exist yet.

[no limit]

15. I'm not sure I follow you.

If they spend 50% of the money and so far created 600,000 to 1.2 million jobs then that means more jobs are still going to be created or saved. Maybe I'm missing something.

[Yupster]

34. If they spent half the stimulus money to create 1.6 million jobs

then that's about $ 300,000 per job created or saved. That can't be right can it?

[no limit]

36. It's government spending the money, so that sounds about right.

Administration overhead for that much money will always be a problem. The recovery.gov site alone cost almost 20 million to build.

[winyanstaz]

38. that is the PROJECTED /estimated job numbers it would create..

they do not have numbers..this is an estimated guess.
If that is the projected number but they have only spent half..then they are not there yet.

[Demeter]

16. Continued Bailouts of Zombie Banks Cost Us 16 Million Jobs

Hardly a fair trade, n'est-ce pas?

[HughMoran]

17. Up is down

Good news is bad. Love the DU!

[BREMPRO]

19. DU's unique reverse orwellian projection syndrome.

idealism has it's faults.

[jpak]

20. NOOOoooooo It's another Another Obama failure!!111 Vote 3rd Party 2012!!!11

Waaahhhhh!!11

:cry:



















:evilgrin:

[NMDemDist2]

22. i can only speak of my rural area but

we had a bunch of 'shovel ready' projects and I know we had two guys down from ALBQ and Denver for a month and they said it was the first work they'd had in months and were glad for it.

the highway to El Paso was stopped in the middle of a big widening project that is now up and running again with a lot of guys in big machines moving rocks and laying road

there are seven local guys doing a big remodel that will take 120 days to complete in our Visitor comfort station

there were 5 people here last week scoping out the job to lay all new wiring. that project is expected to last three years and employ at least 20 outside people (plus the people that will make the wire and lighting fixtures...)

so there's 40-50 jobs just in southern New Mexico that I know of personally

:shrug:

[Zavulon]

23. What a pantload.

There hasn't been a single "saved or created" estimate that doesn't contain stuff like $42,000 creating five thousand jobs here or two fire trucks creating 4,000 jobs there. I would sooner trust Tiger Woods' account of his car accident than any "created or saved" report. If the stimulus was so effective, there wouldn't be talks of another one and we wouldn't be getting so many pieces of "created or saved" spin control.

[Psephos]

27. 1% of GDP = $140 b. 3.2% of GDP = $720b. Stimulus bill = $790 b. What a joke.

So much for the "multiplier" effect. The multiplier is less than one. It would have been more economically effective to pile the money in dump trucks and hand it out at shopping centers. (And no, I am not advocating that, either.)

The stimulus bill was put on the National Bank of China VISA card, which means for the privilege of a *net loss of money* relative to the "stimulation" of GDP we will pay $340 billion in interest over the next ten years. Then, in the next ten years we will pay at least that much again. Then, in the next ten years we will pay at least that much again. Then, in the next ten years....

You get the point.

A little more math. 790 billion / "as many as" 1.6 million jobs "created or saved" = $493,000 per job. Assuming that "created or saved" jobs are quantifiable in any form in accord with GAAP (Generally Accepted Accounting Principles). Which they emphatically are not.

On my planet, a good job pays $50,000. Even if we pretend all the unicorn grooming jobs were actual, real, sustainable jobs net of the private economy baseline, we (actually, the Chinese) paid a half-million dollars for each one. The real per-job number is of course much higher. And those interest charges keep accruing. Year after year after year.

Meanwhile, we were promised that for $790 billion we'd keep unemployment below 8%. la la la la la

[BREMPRO]

40. only 158 billion of the stimulus has been spent to date

not the entire 790 billion. Without the stimulus unemployment would be much higher regardless of what was promised. The govt. had to step in because private industry wasn't creating jobs, but shedding them. Your economic analysis is simplistic, amateurish and clearly partisan and not objective.

http://www.recovery.gov/Pages/home.aspx

[Psephos]

41. Are you actually depending on recovery.gov to buttress your argument? ;) n/t

[BREMPRO]

42. are you actually ignoring my points and facts to support your argument? n/t

[Psephos]

43. "Your economic analysis is simplistic, amateurish and clearly partisan and not objective."

You supplied "facts" from recovery.gov, home of the infamous mystery jobs from Congressional Districts that don't even exist, and you heaped a pantload of unprovoked insults on top. Why should I try to dismantle your argument when you've already done the job for me?

I think I'll take a 7th inning stretch while you keep playing ball, k? ;)

If you're really ambitious, maybe you can take a guess where the next dot on that graph is going to be. Hint: it won't be "under 8%."

[BREMPRO]

44. the CBO report not only confirms the job figures from recovery.gov

but exceeds them. You failed to address that report. Do you dispute the amount of stimulus spent from recovery.org? Your original point was that with 790 billion spent on stimulus we haven't got much result. The general criticism, if you have been paying attention, is that the stimulus has not been spent fast enough and very little has been spent. You can google it if you want to confirm this from other sources, but the recovery.gov are in line with objective observers and critics. The point about the jobs is no that the optimistic projects were off, but that they WOULD have been worse without the stimulus,and economic growth would have stagnated and possibly slipped into negative figures according to the non-partisan CBO. You can fault the Obama team for being overly optimistic, but not for the disaster left them by the previous administration. Your critique sound more like RW noise talking points than objective progressive skepticism.

[bamacrat]

33. Even if its 600k thats great. But of course the right will come out agaisnt this.

[BennyD]

35. Just wondering, will the jobs "saved" by the stimulus be around when the money runs out? n/t

[JonQ]

37. Is this counting the obviously made up jobs?

Like the ones where more jobs were created/saved than there were openings for, or where a raise was considered a portion of a job created?

[winyanstaz]

39. could be..and it is also probably including the "manufacturing jobs"

created by flipping hamburgers.

[No Elephants]

45. Heck, www.recovery.gov alone cost 18 million bucks. Surely, that had to be a few jobs right there?