OPINION: Cost Of Stimulus Jobs

From The Heritage Foundation, I’m Ernest Istook.

Washington has a classic way to release bad news—do it when nobody’s paying attention.

So late Friday afternoon before a holiday weekend, the White House issued a mandatory report about what was called the stimulus package in 2009. You remember it? It cost almost a trillion dollars and supposedly would guarantee that unemployment never reached 8 percent. Sponsors resorted to a downgraded claim that it “SAVED or created” two millions jobs.

The latest report is more embarrassment. Even if you count supposedly saved jobs, each job saved or created cost taxpayers $278-thousand each.

Put another way, we could have given each of those two million Americans a hundred thousand dollars in cash and it would have been half-a-trillion dollars cheaper than the stimulus bill.

There’s plenty of hoakum in the claims made by Washington—when will they learn that we cannot spend our way to prosperity.

From The Heritage Foundation, I’m Ernest Istook.

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