Stimulus package was hardly a tickle for jobs
Sometimes the news just comes flying by you so fast it is hard to keep things in perspective.
Take all those job numbers being bandied about. The Obama administration boasts that 640,000 jobs have been created or saved because of the $787 billion stimulus program. An AP story in today's paper and another in The Wall Street Journal dispute that number. The AP looked at one small program and found two-thirds of the credited 14,500 jobs were bogus. Existing workers who got pay raises were counted as jobs saved, because those were the instructions from Washington.
Coming out this morning is a figure that puts the administration's boast, no matter how inflated, in perspective.
The number of people newly filing for unemployment benefits fell to its lowest point in 10 months. Time to celebrate, right? Perhaps, unless you were one of the 512,000 thrown out of work this past week. That's right, more than 20 million filing for jobless benefits in just the past 10 months. Some of them probably have found work since, but those stimulus jobs don't seem so significant, even if the numbers were accurate ... at $1.2 million per job.
How many jobs would have been saved if businesses had been permitted to keep that $787 billion in lower taxes instead of sending it to Washington for redistribution as raises for government employees?
Even CBS is getting in the act:
Of course, Limbaugh went ballistic:
