i hate how anyone can massage data to make it support their bias.

admittedly i was against the stimulus bill.

but it leaves a bad taste in my mouth that this article's author's strongest point (in the first couple paragraphs) is that 2.5 million jobs were created indirectly by this bill after it became law. and thats a conservative estimate.

however, he avoids doing the quick math, that $787B / $2.5M = $314,800 per job created.

i know i know, there is more to it than that. but if youre going to brag about how this bill has created jobs... then you force me to make that counterargument, that i could create jobs for way less than $314,800 a pop. and he never questions the sustainability of these jobs... i mean, what happens when there is no $787B bill introduced next year and the following year, etc...? surely someone has brought up this obv argument.

yet the writer avoids the obv counterarguments. makes the article seem too biased. but maybe thats just my bias reading into it, meh.

and thats right, i beat thrax into this thread. which means everyone can pga all they want today, he is obv afk and not lurking anywhere.

r u coming monte?

I wish this forum had emoticons

im already there G. ive got an account in top 50. ;)

jpc you looking for this one:

>:(

or this one:

o>8-<]:

(boobs on a skateboard, duh)

The links in the NYT article to the agencies that produced the numbers unfortunately link to the agencies' main pages, not the actual reports, so it's hard to verify the numbers. Do the per-job expenditures include overhead? Or to put it another way, were the number of jobs calculated under the assumption that part of the stimulus funds go to overhead?

In economic lingo, the magnitude of the expenditure multiplier is the inverse of the marginal propensity to save. Governments have a zero marginal propensity to save, so in theory, if the economy was 100& government, the number of new jobs created would be infinite. In real life, the multiplier spills over into the private sector which has a positive marginal propensity to save, so the private sector gets less benefit from the stimulus.

The funds for the stimulus will have to be financed, which puts a burden on the economy, but if the stimulus in fact caused government jobs not to be lost, the burden is offset with the value of the services provided by the saved jobs. Lost jobs are like empty seats in an airliner that has just taken off; those empty seats can never be recovered.

Womens' snowboard cross:

o>8-<] o>8-<] o>8-</ o>8-<]

"$787B / $2.5M = $314,800 per job created. "

1) Your figure assumes all the money is spent on one years salary. Many projects are longer than a year.

2) It's not all money gone. Invesement in infastructure will have an economic effect. eg. A bridge may save millions of driving hours over its lifetime.

read it.......gave it about as much credit as you would if I referenced an article from Fox News.

NY times = left wing