President Obama predicted that his latest jobs proposal, a $447 billion spending proposal, would create 1.9 million new jobs and cut unemployment by one percent.
Obama made this fearless prediction at a Democratic Party fundraiser:
Accepting for the sake of argument President Obama’s prediction, that means Obama intends to spend $230,000 to create each new job. The predicted drop in unemployment would leave the unemployment percentage at 8.1% – or, put another way, one tenth of a percentage point higher than the unemployment number that Obama said his previous stimulus package would avoid.
But Obama has higher expectations for this spending bill than the 2009 stimulus, which he said “saved or created” up to 3.3 million jobs, even as unemployment skyrocketed far beyond the 8% figure that he promised the stimulus would avoid, finally peaking above 10%. The Congressional Budget Office scored the bill at $814 billion, meaning that the Obama Administration estimates that his previous stimulus bill spent a little under $247,000 on every job “saved or created.”
Would anyone be surprised if the White House argued they were “saving” $17,000 per job on president’s new plan compared to his old stimulus?
