DISQUS

A Happy Hospitalist: http://thehappyhospitalist.blogspot.com/2009/01/850-billion-dollars.html

  • Mystery Medic · 11 months ago
    Sorry sir...you are WAY to educated to get a guberment job worth $294,000. By hey, maybe all us medical folk will be working for free health care soon. Now don't you have some student loans you still need to pay off to fund this? BACK TO WORK!!!
  • Braden · 11 months ago
    Just give 3 million people 283 thousand, and watch the stimulus it provides for Lexus and Mercedes.
  • cwj · 11 months ago
    You seem to be looking at the 850 billion like it is somehow the salary for the person working the job. I think the overall goal with the stimulus is to put money in the right places so that long-lasting jobs will be created. If the stimulus is able to create 3 million jobs that will last for years and years to come, I don't think it is necessarily a bad thing. Albeit an expensive one.
  • Steve Parker, M.D. · 11 months ago
    I'm starting to feel sorry for Obama. He's way beyond his pay grade when it comes to the economy. [When asked, "at what point does human life begin?", he said that issue was beyond his pay grade.]

    He and his Democratic co-conspirators will go down in history as proving, once again, that socialism is a failed philosophy. They will turn a moderate recession into a prolonged and deep one.

    He had so much hope and promise.

    -Steve





  • Anonymous · 11 months ago
    I have a friend who is a highway contractor. I saw him the other day, and I congratulated him on his impending windfall. He noted that a) the money won't actually get here until next year, and b) as we have no major highway projects in the works, we'll use the monet to repave roads that don't really need it.
    The 850 billion figure was selected simply because it had to be a little bit bigger than the bank bailout. It is an expensive piece of symbolism.
  • Anonymous · 11 months ago
    http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/26/opinion/26kru... Krugman:
    First, there’s the bogus talking point that the Obama plan will cost $275,000 per job created. Why is it bogus? Because it involves taking the cost of a plan that will extend over several years, creating millions of jobs each year, and dividing it by the jobs created in just one of those years.

    It’s as if an opponent of the school lunch program were to take an estimate of the cost of that program over the next five years, then divide it by the number of lunches provided in just one of those years, and assert that the program was hugely wasteful, because it cost $13 per lunch. (The actual cost of a free school lunch, by the way, is $2.57.)

    The true cost per job of the Obama plan will probably be closer to $100,000 than $275,000 — and the net cost will be as little as $60,000 once you take into account the fact that a stronger economy means higher tax receipts.




  • Anonymous · 11 months ago
    Remember that the 850 billion is not money that has been collected in taxes and redistributed. It is money the the government is borrowing (with interest - albiet at low rates). This moeny MUST come from somewhere (either China -although less likely now that Geinter and Obama are pissing the Chinese off about the valuation of the yuan - or from other countries). Is it better to create "jobs" that will last a couple of years at best with money we don't have or let the efficient market continue to cycle and value flow to the sectors that are demanding it? Planned economies don't work (see USSR, East Germany, China prior to capitalism, N Korea and the list goes on). The unemployment rate in the US after 5 years of the New Deal (1938) was at 22% - the same as before the New Deal started. Government "jobs Programs" don't work.