Fight disinformation: Sign up for the free Mother Jones Daily newsletter and follow the news that matters.


JOB CREATION….As word of Barack Obama’s stimulus package starts making the rounds, conservatives are reviving one of their favorite tropes: that’s sure an expensive way to put people to work! Basically, they divide $700 billion by 2.5 million jobs and announce that the cost of the plan is $280,000 per job, a whopping figure in anyone’s book. But Mark Thoma does the actual math, and it turns out that the numbers at hand are actually $490 billion and 5.4 million jobs:

If we actually get the 5 million jobs the estimates say we will get, what is the cost per job? It is $490 billion divided by 5,425,000, or $90,323. (Note that by targeting spending to places that have a high employment rate per dollar spent, we may be able to do even better than this.)

But this is GDP per job, it includes wages, rent, interest, and profit, it’s not the amount labor takes home. About 70 percent of income goes to labor….If we take 70% of $90,323, we get about $63,000 (actually, $63,226). That’s less than a quarter of the $280,000 figure.

Read the whole thing for more. I’m just presenting this as a public service, since this talking point is almost certain to get extensive play on Fox News and elsewhere. Forewarned is forearmed.

Fact:

Mother Jones was founded as a nonprofit in 1976 because we knew corporations and billionaires wouldn't fund the type of hard-hitting journalism we set out to do.

Today, reader support makes up about two-thirds of our budget, allows us to dig deep on stories that matter, and lets us keep our reporting free for everyone. If you value what you get from Mother Jones, please join us with a tax-deductible donation today so we can keep on doing the type of journalism 2022 demands.

payment methods

Fact:

Today, reader support makes up about two-thirds of our budget, allows us to dig deep on stories that matter, and lets us keep our reporting free for everyone. If you value what you get from Mother Jones, please join us with a tax-deductible donation today so we can keep on doing the type of journalism 2022 demands.

payment methods

We Recommend

Latest

Sign up for our free newsletter

Subscribe to the Mother Jones Daily to have our top stories delivered directly to your inbox.

Get our award-winning magazine

Save big on a full year of investigations, ideas, and insights.

Subscribe

Support our journalism

Help Mother Jones' reporters dig deep with a tax-deductible donation.

Donate