Sunday, December 5, 2010

Restoring science to its rightful place

E21 blog summarizes a new study that takes an empirical look at the results of Obama's "stimulus" policies. (Most analyses, like the oft-cited CBO estimate, use formulas based on assumptions to derive their numbers.)
The results suggest that though the program did result in 2 million jobs “created or saved” by March 2010, net job creation was statistically indistinguishable from zero by August of this year. Taken at face value, this would suggest that the stimulus program (with an overall cost of $814 billion) worked only to generate temporary jobs at a cost of over $400,000 per worker. Even if the stimulus had in fact generated this level of employment as a durable outcome, it would still have been an extremely expensive way to generate employment.
HT: Peter Robinson at Ricochet

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