Obama Saves Jobs. . . From Being Worked

If Obama keeps "saving" jobs, we're all going to be unemployed soon. Indeed, since January, Obama has saved 84,000 jobs, but he's done so at the cost of $719 billion and 3.9 million real jobs. Read on. . .

Obama's Promises Are Nonsense

During the campaign, candidate Obama promised to create five million jobs and to bring peace between the very rocks and the waves. Sounds good, right? Think again.

Unemployment at the end of 2008 was at 6.9% according to the Bureau of Labor. Said differently, of the 155 million “workers” in the United States, 10.6 million were unemployed. Obama’s plan to create five million new jobs, therefore would have translated into a reduction in the employment rate from 6.9% to 3.2% -- two percentage points below what is considered the natural rate of unemployment. That’s not good. Can you say hyperinflation?

Fortunately, times change and so do Obama’s promises. A month later, as Obama assumed the position in the Oval Office, he lowered his claim. Gone was the plan to create 5 million jobs, and in its place was a promise to create or save 3.5 million jobs. This would bring unemployment down to a more realistic 4.5% (if all the jobs were created) or it would leave it unchanged (if Obama favored us only with saved jobs).

Of course, the claim that he would “save” jobs made this promise nonsensical, as Republican Sen. John Ensign pointed out to Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner (pictured left):

"When you use the term 'create or save' you've given yourself complete leverage where you cannot be wrong, because you can take any scenario and make yourself look correct."

And Ensign would be right, except that Obama can’t stop taking credit for everything good he can find. Thus, not only can we analyze Obama's plan, but we can analyze the results he is trumpetting. . . and they blow.

The Obama Plan

Obama told us that he would only shake his magic job-giving beads, if we passed the stimulus bill. The price tag on the stimulus bill was $787 billion (not counting the $152 billion already provided in the Economic Stimulus Act of 2008 or the $700 billion spent on the Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP), $455 billion of which has already been given to 608 companies).

Thus, depending on what you include, Obama plans to spend either $939 billion or $1.649 trillion to create those 3.5 million jobs. That works out to either $286,285 or $471,142 per job.

(And this doesn’t even address the issue that the $787 billion price tag for the stimulus is understated, with the real price tag being closer to $3.27 trillion -- which would mean we’re paying $1.28 million per job).

How Is Obama's Plan Working?

In the past week, there have been murmurings about the lack of jobs. See, Obama promised to create or save 3.5 million jobs between January 2009 and January 2011. But while we are nearly a quarter of the way to January 2011, he’s only created 150,000 jobs so far -- a mere 4% of the number promised.

Even more troubling, 66,000 of those were short-term summer jobs created by the census department, each of which would have been created even without the stimulus, and each of which will disappear again soon. Thus, Obama's stimulus really created only 84,000 jobs (or 2.4% of his total promise).

To be fair, though, Obama hasn't spent all of the stimulus yet. Indeed, he's only spent $719 billion of the total stimulus so far. . . working out to around $8.6 million per job!

But never fear, Obama has promised to step up his game. He will shake the magic beads again. On Monday, he promised that he would create/save another 600,000 jobs in the next 100 days. Of course, 125,000 of these are part-time summer youth jobs, and 135,000 are public sector education jobs, and 5,000 are public sector law enforcement, but the other 335,000 could well be permanent, private sector jobs.

And while this hardly fits Obama’s state of the union promise that “more than 90 percent of these jobs will be in the private sector,” at least this is a step in the right direction. Indeed, won't adding another 750,000 jobs to the economy will reduce unemployment by 7%, bringing the unemployment rate down to 6.5%? No.

It would have worked that way, if unemployment hadn’t kept increasing. But the May unemployment rate rose to 9.4% or 14.5 million unemployed. Thus, while Obama was busy making 84,000 jobs, the economy lost 3.9 million jobs, for a net loss of 3.8 million jobs!

Moreover, Obama’s promise to create (or save) 3.5 million jobs doesn't look so good anymore. Even if he manages to create all of those jobs, his efforts now will only “reduce” the unemployment rate to 7.2% -- 0.3 percentage points above where it was when he started.

Sweet dancing gnomes! $4.122 trillion in spending and $3 trillion more in loan guarantees under the TARP, and that's all we're going to get?!! Stop Mr. President. . . just stop.

But I will leave you with this little bit of good news. At this rate, it will take Obama 91 years to bring employment to zero in this country. . . just a little longer than it took the Soviets.