Words from my husband: Govt Math

As some of you know, I'm far from being the "go to" guy when it comes to any involving mathematics. Every aspect of my company involves math of some sort but in today's day and age we have wonderful computer programs to figure out all those complex problems. I did figure out one math problem on my own today while I was sifting through news stories in preparation for the Presidents State of the Union address tonight. I keep hearing numbers from 30,000 to half a million "jobs saved or created" by the thrifty or in my opinion "shifty" government stimulus package aka the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009. In my 40 years on this planet and most of them spent here right in the good 'ol US of A, I've never seen our government spend any amount of money wisely except for maybe during World War II which was, in fact , way before I was born! On the White House's own website http://www.recovery.gov/Pages/home.aspx I came across some figures which led me to bust out the calculator app on my pc and do some old school math. As of 10/30/2009 they claimed to have saved or created over 640,000 jobs with the stimulus. This number "according to officials ", is much higher now so I figured I would just double it for the 2 months November and December. This would make 1.28 million jobs, divide this by the money spent so far, 173 billion and you get...... roughly $135,000 per job. Now I don't know about you, but most of us don't make anything near 135k a year. The job totals are even under great scrutiny with no one method being used to calculate those numbers. The site says these numbers come from recipients of the funds so there is really no way to verify them. I have even read that one method used was if the company, school, local govt office, etc received any stimulus money whatsoever, they report the number of employees they have to this recovery website. So say a university receives 100,000 to repair a roof or buy books or whatever, they report the number of jobs saved or created as their total number of employees. So professors, librarians, landscapers, janitors, etc all got their job saved by that 100k. That's just one example but I'm sure you get the picture. I have even read that monies were sent to congressional districts that don't even exist ! So what do I think of all this? No matter how anyone fudges the numbers on either side on the political aisle, they just don't add up to money well spent. I say return the unspent money back to us taxpayers and let the free market economy that this great country was founded on do its job. Big government does not "create or save" jobs. I along with other small business owners create over 80% of all jobs in the US. Quit taxing me to death, then
blow my hard earned money on worthless govt spending sprees and I might just be able to add one or two REAL jobs to that pathetic number !!!

-Paul Beauregard