At least if you work for the government:
Our benchmark results suggest that the ARRA created/saved approximately 450 thousand state and local government jobs and destroyed/forestalled roughly one million private sector jobs. State and local government jobs were saved because ARRA funds were largely used to offset state revenue shortfalls and Medicaid increases rather than boost private sector employment. The majority of destroyed/forestalled jobs were in growth industries including health, education, professional and business services.
If you weren’t an administration/Democrat crony, not so stimulating at all. A net loss of half a million jobs.
This sounds about right for government work. I’d like to know how many billions are spent on bean counters whose sole job is to make sure money isn’t wasted on unnecessary things.
Perhaps if they had focused stimulus spending in the private sector, non-government workers who were employed by the spending would have been able to pay enough in taxes to keep the government workers employed.
Last week on Mythbusters, they proved you could propel a sailboat by blowing a fan against the sail. It was horribly inefficient but the boat did move.
I now know where Obama gets his ideas about the economy. He apparently believes that if you have enough people working for the government, it will finance itself.
I cannot accept this paper without checking, very carefully, the assumptions on the input side. It begs these questions:
1. for the infrastructure spending (a little over 1/3 of the total) did they include the jobs created by secondary effects (parts and materials suppliers, spending by those employed, etc.)? Past studies have proven that infrastructure spending has a multiplier effect, somewhere around 3:1 leverage. If the ideological bias of these two researchers prevented them from including that effect, then their overall conclusion will be erroneous.
2. On what basis did they “evaluate” the “jobs forestalled”? What assumptions were used in that computation? What economic mechanism was assumed?
I visited the blog you linked to. That blog had a hyperlink to the paper itself, which did not work.
Economics is now so politicized, on the right just as much as on the left, that it is providing less real guidance to us every year.