[ExI] jobs created or saved

[spike]

> -----Original Message-----
> From: extropy-chat-bounces at lists.extropy.org 
> [mailto:extropy-chat-bounces at lists.extropy.org] On Behalf Of 
> Damien Broderick
> Sent: Wednesday, November 25, 2009 4:18 PM
> To: ExI chat list
> Subject: Re: [ExI] jobs created or saved
> 
> On 11/24/2009 8:50 PM, spike wrote:
> 
> > 	Many here are science types, so perhaps you have been 
> as entertained 
> > as I have by the claim by the US government that the 700 billion 
> > dollar stimulus bill created or saved 640329 jobs.
> ...
> > If they meant $1.2 million per job-eon, this would be a 
> bargain, for 
> > the taxes alone on a minimum wage job-eon would run into 
> the billions.  
> > But I rather suspect it was more like job-hours or 
> job-weeks, for each 
> > of those
> > 1.2 million dollar expenditures.
> 
> This is a very strange post.
> 
> 1. Are you asserting that the sole declared purpose of the 
> "stimulus bill" was to "create or save" jobs, and by funding 
> them directly? It had nothing to do with shoring up a 
> self-buggered financial system, etc?

Close.  What I am asserting is that the action taken by the government to
crave jobs actually destroyed jobs in the long run.  I am not even denying
that the financial system is self-buggered, merely that the action taken may
have self-buggered it further.

> 2. Do you actually think that a claim of saving or creating a 
> job might really mean "for a few hours"?...

The recovery.gov site asked recipients of government largesse to state the
number of jobs created or saved by the stimulus.  My claim is that the
question itself, as asked, is completely meaningless.  At least in some
cases, it evidently was interpreted as job-hours:

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/05/us/05stimulus.html?_r=1

Others may have interpreted it as job-years or some other unit, but
evidently these dissimilar units are all added together without conversion
to a common unit, with the result being a derision-attracting answer of
640329.

There was the usual fog of war stuff:

http://blogs.csun.edu/news/clips/2009/11/06/many-california-jobs-%E2%80%99sa
ved%E2%80%99-by-stimulus-funds-weren%E2%80%99t-in-jeopardy/

> some of the funds have gone toward time-limited employment of 
> a couple of months...

Ja and this end in itself is worth something.  But to report it as a job
saved or created is misleading:

http://www.dispatchpolitics.com/live/content/local_news/stories/2009/05/26/p
olice_budget.html?sid=101

> ...only get 
> *really really* angry if it turns out that this reasonable 
> assumption has been abused and violated... Damien Broderick

Looks to me like that is what happened.  I don't know how many jobs were
lost or destroyed by anticipating the tax structure necessary to pay all
this back some time in the future.

Where is the next Calvin Coolidge when we desperately need him?

spike