"Stimulus" costs $278,000 per government "created or saved" job

And these numbers don't even count the jobs that were lost by the government taking away money from other activities. A copy of government's claims are available here. That is a cost of between $185,000 and $278,000 per job, assuming that someplace between 2.4 and 3.6 million jobs have supposedly been created. About 85 percent of ARRA’s budgetary impact was realized by the end of June 2011.

The report was written by the White House’s Council of Economic Advisors, a group of three economists who were all handpicked by Obama, and it chronicles the alleged success of the “stimulus” in adding or saving jobs. The council reports that, using “mainstream estimates of economic multipliers for the effects of fiscal stimulus” (which it describes as a “natural way to estimate the effects of” the legislation), the “stimulus” has added or saved just under 2.4 million jobs — whether private or public — at a cost (to date) of $666 billion. That’s a cost to taxpayers of $278,000 per job.

In other words, the government could simply have cut a $100,000 check to everyone whose employment was allegedly made possible by the “stimulus,” and taxpayers would have come out $427 billion ahead. . . .

Back in early 2009, President Obama claimed that the ARRA would create 4.1 million jobs.