[sickoflibs]

RE "Recovery: After nearly all the stimulus money has been spent, the Congressional Budget Office now admits it cost more than advertised, did less to boost growth and will hurt the economy in the long run. In its latest quarterly report on the economic effects of the Obama stimulus, the CBO sharply lowered its "worst case" scenario while trimming many of its upper-bound estimates for stimulus-fueled growth and employment. The new report finds, for example, that the stimulus may have added as little as 0.7% to GDP growth in 2010 — when spending was at its peak — and created as few as 700,000 new jobs."

Eight hundred billion $$$ for 700,000 jobs is over 1 M $$ per job. So time to tax the rich?

[ding_dong_daddy_from_dumas]

And lo and behold, if you create a model that predicts the law will create jobs, and then you rerun a mild variation of that model a few years later using updated figures about what money was actually spent, it still reports that the stimulus created jobs. But there’s no counting here, no real-world attempt to assess the reality of the stimulus—just a model that assumes that stimulus spending will create jobs and therefore reports that stimulus spending has in fact created jobs. As CBO director Douglas Elmendorf confirmed on the record last year in response to a question, “if the stimulus bill did not do what it was originally forecast to do, then that would not have been detected by the subsequent analysis.”

[Marine_Uncle]

Things have gotten far out of hand to put it mildly.

[adk]

Surely you must understand that the entire $800 billion was not spent merely on payroll. Equipment, materials, these don’t come out of thin air.

[SunkenCiv]

Thanks sickoflibs.