It is generally accepted that it costs somewhere in the range of $120,000 to $150,000 for the private sector – that’s the evil capitalist, free enterprise sector – to create one job.  This covers not only the salary that will be paid to the new worker, but to investments in space, materials, equipment, marketing efforts and other costs associated with job creation.

OK … that’s the private sector.  But since we have a president – for now, at least – who thinks that it is the government’s responsibility to create jobs, let’s look into THOSE numbers for a few minutes.  James Pethokoukis, a researcher with The American Enterprise Institute, has done just this with some numbers from the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) and the Joint Committee on Taxation.  These two bodies looked at Obama’s stimulus bill and its effect on our budget deficit, our GDP, unemployment rates and the numbers of people employed due to stimulus spending. 

Here are some bullet points.  And remember --- these numbers come from the CBO.

Because of Obama’s stimulus spending:

• GDP was increased by between 0.1% and 1%
• Unemployment was lowered by between 0.1% and 0.8%  (Not even a 1% reduction)
• The number of people employed was increased by between .2 million and 1.5 million.

Now the ranges there are rather wide … so the estimate of the amount of stimulus money spent for each new job is correspondingly wide.  Here you go:

Under Obama’s stimulus bill – actually written by Nancy Pelosi – it cost anywhere from $540,000 to $4,100,000 for each job created.  The private sector does this for $120,000 to $150,000 … but for government the cost is, at best, four times that … and up …. Way up.  If you just go for the median you’re spending over $3 million for each job produced.

Government does a fantastic job creating jobs, don’t you think?