Wasting Time With Alex

Jobs, jobs, jobs…

I recommend a trip to an awesome site that animates ”The Geography of Jobs” showing the top 100 metropolitan statistical areas in the contiguous United States based on number of jobs as of December 2008, and runs from 2004 to 2010 (just 3 months away). Something is very telling there.

Update: Over at The Hill, they are now pointing out that the first direct stimulus patronage bill reports, the hard data collected so far for the $780 billion (over a trillion once it is paid off) payout, is showing that for the $16 billion they have looked out of the $339 billion awarded so far, we have really only had a measly 30,083 jobs created. Then they extrapolate that out to 1.2 million jobs saved or created directly by this bill. What is missing is that it is almost a given that most of these jobs are all in government or the public sector, the unproductive and unsustainable sector of the economy, and that they will need to suck money out of the economy to keep this crap going. Unless there is another stimulus patronage bill next year these jobs will go away. The indisputable fact is that over 3.4 million jobs have been lost since the bill was passed, and that over 15 million Americans remain unemployed, with tens of thousands more joining their ranks every month.

One statistic that I do not see is that if you divide that $16 billion by the number of jobs created, 30,083, you end up with each job created by this bill costing us roughly around $531,862. I am certain none of these people are getting paid that much, so the question begs to be asked: could this have been done more efficiently?