Obama’s Economists: ‘Stimulus’ Has Cost $278,000 per Job

[DarrinS]

You really relied on a source that says this for the budget amounts?



I know its just Spurstalk but I'm actually embarrassed for you.

My bad.


If this one official enough?

http://www.window.state.tx.us/taxbud/expend.html

[RandomGuy]

Very creative.

I'll give you a real world example. And I'll make it short and sweet.

I used to work for a consulting company. Each of the consultants had a group of support staff. The more consultants we hired, the more support staff we would hire. If memory serves, there were about 3-4 admin staff for each consultant. Don't get me wrong, the admin staff were absolutely essential for the consultant to do their job, but would it make sense to start hiring 5-6 admin staff while simultaneously laying off consultants?

Thanks.

I agree that you need the moneymakers, but don't think that people who teach kids, or inspect food/planes, or regulate solvency of banks/insurance companies/hedge funds really are all just dead weight.

The most glaring example of how important non-money makers are can be seen in both Iraq and Afghanistan.

The police that provide security don't in and of themselves create jobs, but provide the conditions for the people who do create jobs to get on with their work.

I don't think we are anywhere near the point where there are "too many" government jobs relative to the private sector, because I understand the value of the public goods created by what government we do have.

As to your real world example:

It depends, on how the company works.

To be honest, you probably should hire the consultants that provide the jobs.

But if you fire all the support staff, and the consultants themselves have to waste time on non-productive administrative stuff, then all the consultants in the world won't help much, depending on the mix and pay scales.

There is a reason why modern armies have a lot of "support staff". This strongly suggests to me that the benefits strongly outweigh the costs.

I am quite aghast at the stupidity of my own state's legislature, and how much they are going to gut the educational system. At some point, the state's inability to attract educated people, or people with kids, will start affecting the ability of businesses to find qualified people to work here, and I think the cuts being tossed around really will have that kind of strong effect a few years down the road.

We get to try out all the Republican ideas on how best to run things here in Texas with the GOP governor and supermajority in the lege. When it fails, the responsibility will not be hard to acertain. If it works as good as some say it will, , I might even switch parties and become a convert.

When it doesn't, though, you won't hear the end of it. >

[MannyIsGod]

Yes. There is a disconnect between the states numbers on the page I linked and those on the paged you linked, however. I'm not sure why that is although I have seen the higher numbers that I posted reported and I can't say I've ever seen the 90 billion mark reported.

[RandomGuy]

http://www.usgovernmentspending.com/....html#usgs302a

State & Local Spending by Function (click chart)
...
source: guesstimated2

Seriously? That's what you're going with?

[DarrinS]

Seriously? That's what you're going with?

Hey, I have him a link to the State comptroller.

[MannyIsGod]

I gave you a direct link to the budgets by the same office though. The link I showed you shows a 25% reduction in the 2011 budget. And that's just Texas.

[RandomGuy]

Hey, I have him a link to the State comptroller.

If you read the notes, the most recent *actual* data is from 2009.

Given the roughly $27bn hole in the 2012+13 bi-ennial budget, I would guess that his "based on historical factors" guestimate is materially over-estimated.

Spending will be cut in Texas, as it has all over the US. I will see if I can dig through manny's link and sift through other stuff as well. I think I downloaded the most recent budget proposal somewhere.

[MannyIsGod]

I do find it kind of funny that you sent me to a NET expenditures page, Darrin. This was right after you talked about total expenditures.

[RandomGuy]

SB 1 passes Senate, frustrates budget hawks
http://www.texasbudgetsource.com/

Senate Bill 1, the omnibus budget bill that cuts $4 billion in education funding, among other things, was passed by the Senate today by a vote of 21-9.

Aside from fund k-12 education over the next two years, SB 1 adds additional sources of state revenue with the addition of several new taxes and fees and creates a series of budgeting gimmicks that postpone certain financial obligations until the following biennium. The particularly noteworthy Amazon tax, which would force online retailers to pay sales taxes to the state, was included in the bill.

Other noteworthy highlights of the bill include: an increase in the cigarette “stamp tax”, which raises the price of business for cigarette distributors; speeding up of fuel tax payments and delaying transfers to the state highway fund; speeding up of alcoholic beverage taxes; sales tax prepayments; a sales-for-resale provision; and increased lobbying fees.

After the constant mantra of “no new taxes” from both legislators as well as the Governor, fiscal conservatives in Texas are likely not impressed with the expenses imposed by SB 1. A champion against the Amazon tax for months, Governor Perry is expected to concede defeat and sign SB 1 into law in the coming days.

I'm shocked. Shocked I say!

... and by shocked I mean not shocked at all that they weaseld out of doing what they said they were going to. Everybody with any common sense knows that the tea party bull is seriously stupid.

(edit)

If you have any questions about the budget or the budget process, please feel free to contact us at: [email protected].

Texas’ 2010-11 state budget, passed by the Texas Legislature in 2009, includes more than $182 billion in total appropriations and provides funding for dozens of agencies and hundreds of programs. Inside the state’s massive two-year budget—which spans more than 950 pages—is a complex mix of funding formulas and budget jargon, often only understood by insiders and experts.

To help the average Texan get a better understanding of the state’s fiscal picture, TexasBudgetSource has carefully studied Senate Bill 1 and explained it in abbreviated terms. In addition, we have also compared it with past budgets to give this biennium’s budget some context.

Interesting website.

[LnGrrrR]

Public employees are kinda like hiring a bunch of admin people in a private business. They are overhead. You WANT to hire the people that make/sell the products/services that drive profits. That way, you can grow and hire even more people.

That's the same argument people use for network security, until they get hacked and have to pay millions in a lawsuit.

[DarrinS]

That's the same argument people use for network security, until they get hacked and have to pay millions in a lawsuit.

Overhead is necessary, but it's still overhead. Should a company hire 20 network security pros when they only need two?

[Winehole23]

I do find it kind of funny that you sent me to a NET expenditures page, Darrin. This was right after you talked about total expenditures.

Weaselly. That's all part of his craft and his art. Did you like how he tried to claim the kill earlier on? Cracked my old ass up.

[Winehole23]

(sorry, LED thread leakage)

[LnGrrrR]

Overhead is necessary, but it's still overhead. Should a company hire 20 network security pros when they only need two?

Of course not. But many (smaller) businesses tend to discount spending on security because it doesn't "do anything". It's not giving them more bandwidth, more access, etc etc.

I don't think that all government workers are "overhead" workers, which is what I thought you were implying.

[Wild Cobra]

Of course not. But many (smaller) businesses tend to discount spending on security because it doesn't "do anything". It's not giving them more bandwidth, more access, etc etc.

I don't think that all government workers are "overhead" workers, which is what I thought you were implying.

Yet the peanut counters continue to find new ways to count peanuts to justify their useless jobs.

[LnGrrrR]

Yet the peanut counters continue to find new ways to count peanuts to justify their useless jobs.

Why not blame the people who keep hiring the peanut counters?

[RandomGuy]

Yet the peanut counters continue to find new ways to count peanuts to justify their useless jobs.

It has been my experience counting peanuts for a living that the businesses that put the least emphasis on counting their peanuts tend to make very little money and very often founder and sink, because they don't how how many peanuts it costs them to actually run their business, and set their prices below that unknowingly.

Every bookkeeping client I had ended up making far more money, even with the extra added expense of my $20/hr help as a mere grad student, than they were making before I got involved. Invariably, they were doing something that made no sense once you tallied up the peanuts.

Accountants don't get to charge $150-$400 hr for nothing.

[Wild Cobra]

It has been my experience counting peanuts for a living that the businesses that put the least emphasis on counting their peanuts tend to make very little money and very often founder and sink, because they don't how how many peanuts it costs them to actually run their business, and set their prices below that unknowingly.

Every bookkeeping client I had ended up making far more money, even with the extra added expense of my $20/hr help as a mere grad student, than they were making before I got involved. Invariably, they were doing something that made no sense once you tallied up the peanuts.

Accountants don't get to charge $150-$400 hr for nothing.

Are you saying that the bureaucratic nature of government jobs I was referring to are as good as the accountants like you?

[RandomGuy]

Are you saying that the bureaucratic nature of government jobs I was referring to are as good as the accountants like you?

No.

Some of them are worth more.

Ribbing aside, most are not.

But then, most private sector jobs aren't either.

Somebody has to enforce building codes, inspect meat, etc.

We have a complex economy, with a lot of complex needs for things that can't be efficiently or ethically handled by the private sector.

I'm not advocating the kind of strangling Soviet beaurocracy that stunted Russia for decades, but neither do I buy the argument that is where we are at now.

[Winehole23]

maybe the stimulus should have been bigger:

After the 2008 financial crisis, old-fashioned Keynesians offered a simple fix: Stimulate the economy. With idle capacity and unemployed workers, nations could restore economic production at essentially zero real cost. It helped the U.S. in the Great Depression and it could help the U.S. in the Great Recession too. But during and immediately after the crisis, neoliberal and conservative forces attacked the Keynesian school of thought from multiple directions. Stimulus couldn't work because of some weird debt trigger condition, or because it would cause hyperinflation, or because unemployment was "structural," or because of a "skills gap," or because of adverse demographic trends.


Well going on 10 years later, the evidence is in: The anti-Keynesian forces have been proved conclusively mistaken on every single argument. Their refusal to pick up what amounted to a multiple-trillion-dollar bill sitting on the sidewalk is the greatest mistake of economic policy analysis since 1929 at least.

the decade of pointless austerity has severely harmed the American economy — leaving us perhaps $3 trillion below the previous growth trend. Through a combination of bad faith, motivated reasoning, and sheer incompetence, austerians have directly created the problem their entire program was supposed to avoid.

https://theweek.com/articles/789956/...ke-last-decade

[boutons_deux]

Repugs austerity (block and/or minimize) was not their mistake

It was eg McC's clear statement/objective to keep the economy as ty as possible so to implement Repugs' priority of defeating Obama/2016 with bad economy.

Secondly, according to the oligarchy/Repug strategy, having preached for 35+ years that "govt IS the problem", that govt simply cannot and must not do good, and all must come from Capitalism/BigCorp, they had to block the govt doing good For The People.

[Spurtacular]

In other words, the government could simply have cut a $100,000 check to everyone whose employment was allegedly made possible by the “stimulus,” and taxpayers would have come out $427 billion ahead.

Media never nuffin to say about this hoax.

[Winehole23]

actually, I was in favor of front-loaded stimulus.

I doubt you and Darrin would have been.