If, in the future, Republicans ever again ask "Where are the jobs?" it will be because they've forgotten where they buried the ones they killed. For now, though, it's clear they remember all too well.
Like a serial killer returning to a favorite dump site to reminisce or further ravage a corpse, Republicans are returning to the scene of the crime for a bit of fun with the still-fresh remains of 240,000 jobs the GOP killed off last month.
They're coming back for more. On Monday, the Republican Study Committee released this statement:
With the national debt quickly approaching $14 trillion, Washington needs to get serious about cutting spending. One option the next Congress should consider is to restore welfare reform, one of the most successful bipartisan initiatives of the 1990s.
The 1996 welfare reform law created incentives for states to help people get back on their feet and off of taxpayer assistance. However, the 2009 stimulus package created a new "emergency fund" under the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families program which actually incentivizes states to increase their welfare caseloads without requiring able-bodied individuals to work, get job training, or make other efforts to move off of taxpayer assistance. Specifically, a state must increase its welfare caseloads in order to receive any funding, and states receive an 80% match to cover all expenses associated with increasing their welfare caseloads. This costs taxpayers $2.5 billion each year.
Just a couple of points here.
First, thanks to the GOP's obstruction, the TANF Emergency Fund expired on September 30, 2010, effectively putting the 240,000 people who found work through the program out of work. (This must be one of those "We had to destroy the village in order to save it," moments — when conservatives have to kill jobs in order to create them.) It was funded at $5 billion over two years. Now it's dead. The GOP killed it. There have been efforts to extend it, but at a maximum of $2.5 billion.
Second, where does this business about not "requiring able-bodied individuals to work" come from? The Emergency fund has, in its brief existence, put people to work who want to work and would have been out of work otherwise. The money from the Emergency Fund was used by states to subsidize jobs programs that have successfully put "able bodied individuals to work" — including some 120,000 young people who would not have had summer jobs, and 130,000 parents who wouldn't have had jobs to provide for their families.
Some of the successes of the Emergency Fund include:
- South Carolina is using the program to provide jobs to parents who would otherwise be receiving cash assistance through the state's regular TANF (Temporary Assistance for Needy Families) program.
- Illinois has placed more than 20,000 individuals in jobs, far exceeding its original goal of 12,000 placements.
- Alabama is using the program to provide jobs to TANF recipients statewide, but has found it especially helpful in rural communities where very few job opportunities exist.
- North Dakota is providing jobs for unemployed non-custodial parents who don't have the financial resources to meet their child support.
- A rural community in Tennessee created 400 new jobs and helped reduce the county's unemployment rate from 27.3 to 18.6 percent over an eight-month period.
There's a whole lot more here, on how states used TANF to subsidize job programs and put people to work — people who would otherwise have just received cash assistance.
This, Republicans apparently believe, is a very bad thing. Maybe the GOP doesn't think these are "real" jobs. Maybe, like the aforementioned serial killer, the GOP just thinks some jobs need to die, because some jobs shouldn't exist in the first place. Likewise the people whose lives have gotten better because of those jobs.
The point is that the TANF Emergency Fund is an example of a safety net that works when the economy doesn't — like unemployment benefits keeping millions out of poverty — by putting hundreds of thousands of people back to work, where they can learn use their skills instead of lose them, and perhaps learn new skills that may lead to better jobs and better lives. If you want to talk about incentives, these are people who would otherwise have been collecting TANF cash benefits that aren't enough to meet basic needs.
Besides, if Republicans really want something to cut, there are far meatier parts of the budget just waiting for someone with a sharp knife.
One place Democrats could start fighting -- if they can find the backbone -- is to call out the new Republican Speaker Of The House John Boehner over his desire to trim the deficit with Draconian cuts in the federal budget. The word he used was "discretionary" funding. The largest discretionary line in the budget is the Pentagon.
This is a major pissing contest just waiting for somebody to begin the challenge. And the perfect place to start is for somebody to piss on Boehner's shoes
.The Pentagon budget is the largest elephant in the room that no one except the antiwar left will talk about. There is no good reason for this, since the crisis represented by the bloated Pentagon budget goes far beyond the anti-war movement, reaching into the lives of all working Americans. Sure, it will mean a fight, but fighting is good at this juncture - much better than laying down.
No, it's far far better for them to be unemployed and wait for the private sector to create jobs, when taxes and wages are finally low enough. The GOP has no immediate plans to create jobs to replace those they're so eager to kill off. Their best idea is a old, one one: cut taxes and hope for the best. We know what that got us last time: a decade of zero job growth.
That the 240,000 people who will be out of work again are unlikely to find work in the private sector hardly matters. When the people who had work through the TANF Emergency Fund are finally out of work, the GOP will probably deny them unemployment benefits, too, just for kicks.
Until then, there's still some fun to be had with the still-fresh corpse of the TANF Emergency Fund.
The stimulus package failed because it consisted mostly of tax cuts. Tax cuts are among the very worst ways to create jobs and certainly the most expensive.
The stimulus package authorizes 787 billion dollars. According to the official website (Recovery.gov) $565 billion has actually been spent or credited. There are three categories of "stimulus." Citing amounts spent, they are:
- $243.4 billion in tax cuts.
- $154.5 billion in contracts, grants, and loans. This is what we actually think of as a stimulus, construction and research projects.
- $166.8 billion in entitlements. This is mostly money to the states to help with unemployment insurance.
Estimates of jobs "saved and created" by the package range from 800,000 to 2.4 million (both from the Congressional Budget Office), with other estimates at 1.25 million (IHS/Global Insight), 1.06 million (Macroeconomic Advisors), and 1.59 million (Moody's).
Let's use Moody's estimate (sort of the high middle, and independent) and round it off to 1.6 million jobs "saved and created."
That's $353,125 per job.
I'm sorry, but that's ridiculous. It's obscene.
If you have an essentially unlimited line of credit, as the government essentially does, it would appear relatively easy to create jobs.
"Hey, you, over there on the unemployment line, wanna work cleaning up our national parks? Yeah, we'll give you a twenty dollar rake, some biodegradable garbage bags, and twenty bucks an hour." That happens to be 47 cents an hour over the average wage.
No national parks or monuments in your neighborhood?
All right, there are lots of empty lots and abandoned homes due to the housing market collapse. "Let's clean 'em up. Same deal. That's forty thousand a year. You can live on that."
Presumably the government will be decent about it and pay the usual benefits -- social security, unemployment insurance, workman's comp, and so on -- which adds $8.11 an hour. That's a little less than $17,000 a year, making a total cost of $57,000 per year, per job.
Jobs don't exist in a vacuum, not even sweeping the streets by hand with a broom. There has to be a certain number of overhead costs. Not counting salaries of supervisors and such (which would be part of the job creation numbers), not counting benefits (already in there), 15 percent is a very generous number, for another $8,550, a total of $65,550 per job.
So that's what a "created" job should cost. About $65,000.
If you actually want to "create jobs," that's how you should do it. Go out and create them.
But that's not how we do things. We were not goddamn Communists. Or even socialists. We're capitalists. So we give out contracts to private enterprises and grants to universities and other institutions.
Construction projects, one of the primary forms of job creation has lots of costs beside labor. They have machinery, materials, a variety of business expenses (accounting, insurance, legal, etc.), the purchase of land and so on. Labor accounts for 20-30 percent of a construction contract. Let's take the low end, 20 percent, and assume that a construction job is one of those $65,000 wages plus benefits for a full year jobs, and the cost of that job then becomes $325,000.
That's pretty close to the $353,125 per job number we got using the Moody's estimate.
Except that all those other construction costs (excluding land purchase, which should be less relevant here) involve additional labor. For example, materials are manufactured, a certain portion of them here, in the US. Truckers transport them. Building supply company employees handle them. Machinery is built (some portion of it here), and maintained (all of it here). The construction company pays it's staff and the professionals (lawyer and accountants), and so on. All those people buy food (keeping supermarket workers employed), buy other stuff, pay their bills, and so on.
This is the famous Keynesian multiplier effect.
It's also very difficult to calculate how many non-site, indirect jobs does a construction project support with all its other spending. In the figures we're using, that 80% of the costs. It's reasonable to say that at least half of that goes into people's pockets as it moves down the line.
If we figure it that way, it should probably cost about $130,000 per job.
Let's go back to the breakdown.
First let's take out the aid to the states for unemployment insurance assistance. Obviously that doesn't add jobs. It helps people. It goes to keeping the community afloat, but it doesn't create a whole lot of jobs.
Let's take out the tax cuts. Just as an academic exercise, for the moment.
That leaves projects, grants, and loans. $154.5 billion.
If we have 1,600,000 jobs created and saved, and divide it into the money spent on projects, it comes out at $96,562 per job.
That actually makes sense. It's expensive. But it makes sense.
Direct job creation, or job creation through contracts (like road building), has a multiplier effect. Each job creates more jobs, both through the support jobs and through the spending by the people who are employed.
Job creation through tax cuts works the opposite way.
The price per job is multiplied many times over.
In this last election cycle, Carl Paladino was running against Andrew Cuomo for governor of New York. One of the charges that Cuomo leveled against him was that he got $1.4 million in tax breaks but created only one job from that.
The implication was that Paladino was a sleazy rip-off artist. At best.
He may be, but it is only a particularly vivid example of how the tax cuts to job creation equation actually works.
We are still arguing about extending the Bush Tax Cuts.
The Bush Tax Cuts cost about two trillion dollars.
They were originally labeled and promoted as "jobs and stimulus" packages. Let's take him at his word. Over the course of his two terms 1.1 jobs were created. That didn't even keep up with population growth. It also cost $1,818,182 per job.
Close to the same numbers that Paladino was working with.
The Obama White House, a prisoner of the prevailing 'tax cuts stimulate the economy and create jobs' theology, passed a stimulus bill that was 40 percent tax cuts, 30 percent unemployment insurance, and only 27 percent actual stimulus.
That's why it didn't work.
That's not even the bad news.
Here's the bad news. The tax cuts are still in effect. The odds are they will be extended, even for the very wealthiest.
Here's worse news. There's only one thing stupider than cutting taxes to create jobs. It's to cut spending. In the recent NY governor's race, for example, both leading candidates promise to cut spending. That means cutting jobs. That's happening state by state all around the country. Not only does cutting jobs mean, in a very direct one-to-one way, fewer jobs, it has a negative multiplier effect. It means there are fewer people with money to spend on the things that create jobs for other people.
eric seiger
Obama 2012 - Doug Schoen - Fox <b>News</b> | Mediaite
Fox News' Democratic analysts have thrown President Obama under the bus: Doug Schoen and Pat Caddell suggested this weekend that the Democratic Party must cut off its head to stand a chance in 2012. Schoen was back on America Live ...
Breaking <b>News</b>: Humanities in Decline! Film at 11. — Crooked Timber
But I just don't know of any realm of human endeavor in which a precipitous decline from 1967 to 1987, followed by a couple of decades of stability, counts as breaking news. It's the equivalent of saying “sales of Sgt. Pepper posters ...
<b>News</b> on Feliciano and Upton at GM Meetings - Pinstripe Alley
News on Feliciano and Upton at GM Meetings. ... Do you like this story? More from Pinstripe Alley. The Tools of Ignorance: Saturday News. Nov 2010 by jscape2000 - 31 comments. Analyzing Joel Sherman's Post On The Catching Situation ...
eric seiger
If, in the future, Republicans ever again ask "Where are the jobs?" it will be because they've forgotten where they buried the ones they killed. For now, though, it's clear they remember all too well.
Like a serial killer returning to a favorite dump site to reminisce or further ravage a corpse, Republicans are returning to the scene of the crime for a bit of fun with the still-fresh remains of 240,000 jobs the GOP killed off last month.
They're coming back for more. On Monday, the Republican Study Committee released this statement:
With the national debt quickly approaching $14 trillion, Washington needs to get serious about cutting spending. One option the next Congress should consider is to restore welfare reform, one of the most successful bipartisan initiatives of the 1990s.
The 1996 welfare reform law created incentives for states to help people get back on their feet and off of taxpayer assistance. However, the 2009 stimulus package created a new "emergency fund" under the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families program which actually incentivizes states to increase their welfare caseloads without requiring able-bodied individuals to work, get job training, or make other efforts to move off of taxpayer assistance. Specifically, a state must increase its welfare caseloads in order to receive any funding, and states receive an 80% match to cover all expenses associated with increasing their welfare caseloads. This costs taxpayers $2.5 billion each year.
Just a couple of points here.
First, thanks to the GOP's obstruction, the TANF Emergency Fund expired on September 30, 2010, effectively putting the 240,000 people who found work through the program out of work. (This must be one of those "We had to destroy the village in order to save it," moments — when conservatives have to kill jobs in order to create them.) It was funded at $5 billion over two years. Now it's dead. The GOP killed it. There have been efforts to extend it, but at a maximum of $2.5 billion.
Second, where does this business about not "requiring able-bodied individuals to work" come from? The Emergency fund has, in its brief existence, put people to work who want to work and would have been out of work otherwise. The money from the Emergency Fund was used by states to subsidize jobs programs that have successfully put "able bodied individuals to work" — including some 120,000 young people who would not have had summer jobs, and 130,000 parents who wouldn't have had jobs to provide for their families.
Some of the successes of the Emergency Fund include:
- South Carolina is using the program to provide jobs to parents who would otherwise be receiving cash assistance through the state's regular TANF (Temporary Assistance for Needy Families) program.
- Illinois has placed more than 20,000 individuals in jobs, far exceeding its original goal of 12,000 placements.
- Alabama is using the program to provide jobs to TANF recipients statewide, but has found it especially helpful in rural communities where very few job opportunities exist.
- North Dakota is providing jobs for unemployed non-custodial parents who don't have the financial resources to meet their child support.
- A rural community in Tennessee created 400 new jobs and helped reduce the county's unemployment rate from 27.3 to 18.6 percent over an eight-month period.
There's a whole lot more here, on how states used TANF to subsidize job programs and put people to work — people who would otherwise have just received cash assistance.
This, Republicans apparently believe, is a very bad thing. Maybe the GOP doesn't think these are "real" jobs. Maybe, like the aforementioned serial killer, the GOP just thinks some jobs need to die, because some jobs shouldn't exist in the first place. Likewise the people whose lives have gotten better because of those jobs.
The point is that the TANF Emergency Fund is an example of a safety net that works when the economy doesn't — like unemployment benefits keeping millions out of poverty — by putting hundreds of thousands of people back to work, where they can learn use their skills instead of lose them, and perhaps learn new skills that may lead to better jobs and better lives. If you want to talk about incentives, these are people who would otherwise have been collecting TANF cash benefits that aren't enough to meet basic needs.
Besides, if Republicans really want something to cut, there are far meatier parts of the budget just waiting for someone with a sharp knife.
One place Democrats could start fighting -- if they can find the backbone -- is to call out the new Republican Speaker Of The House John Boehner over his desire to trim the deficit with Draconian cuts in the federal budget. The word he used was "discretionary" funding. The largest discretionary line in the budget is the Pentagon.
This is a major pissing contest just waiting for somebody to begin the challenge. And the perfect place to start is for somebody to piss on Boehner's shoes
.The Pentagon budget is the largest elephant in the room that no one except the antiwar left will talk about. There is no good reason for this, since the crisis represented by the bloated Pentagon budget goes far beyond the anti-war movement, reaching into the lives of all working Americans. Sure, it will mean a fight, but fighting is good at this juncture - much better than laying down.
No, it's far far better for them to be unemployed and wait for the private sector to create jobs, when taxes and wages are finally low enough. The GOP has no immediate plans to create jobs to replace those they're so eager to kill off. Their best idea is a old, one one: cut taxes and hope for the best. We know what that got us last time: a decade of zero job growth.
That the 240,000 people who will be out of work again are unlikely to find work in the private sector hardly matters. When the people who had work through the TANF Emergency Fund are finally out of work, the GOP will probably deny them unemployment benefits, too, just for kicks.
Until then, there's still some fun to be had with the still-fresh corpse of the TANF Emergency Fund.
The stimulus package failed because it consisted mostly of tax cuts. Tax cuts are among the very worst ways to create jobs and certainly the most expensive.
The stimulus package authorizes 787 billion dollars. According to the official website (Recovery.gov) $565 billion has actually been spent or credited. There are three categories of "stimulus." Citing amounts spent, they are:
- $243.4 billion in tax cuts.
- $154.5 billion in contracts, grants, and loans. This is what we actually think of as a stimulus, construction and research projects.
- $166.8 billion in entitlements. This is mostly money to the states to help with unemployment insurance.
Estimates of jobs "saved and created" by the package range from 800,000 to 2.4 million (both from the Congressional Budget Office), with other estimates at 1.25 million (IHS/Global Insight), 1.06 million (Macroeconomic Advisors), and 1.59 million (Moody's).
Let's use Moody's estimate (sort of the high middle, and independent) and round it off to 1.6 million jobs "saved and created."
That's $353,125 per job.
I'm sorry, but that's ridiculous. It's obscene.
If you have an essentially unlimited line of credit, as the government essentially does, it would appear relatively easy to create jobs.
"Hey, you, over there on the unemployment line, wanna work cleaning up our national parks? Yeah, we'll give you a twenty dollar rake, some biodegradable garbage bags, and twenty bucks an hour." That happens to be 47 cents an hour over the average wage.
No national parks or monuments in your neighborhood?
All right, there are lots of empty lots and abandoned homes due to the housing market collapse. "Let's clean 'em up. Same deal. That's forty thousand a year. You can live on that."
Presumably the government will be decent about it and pay the usual benefits -- social security, unemployment insurance, workman's comp, and so on -- which adds $8.11 an hour. That's a little less than $17,000 a year, making a total cost of $57,000 per year, per job.
Jobs don't exist in a vacuum, not even sweeping the streets by hand with a broom. There has to be a certain number of overhead costs. Not counting salaries of supervisors and such (which would be part of the job creation numbers), not counting benefits (already in there), 15 percent is a very generous number, for another $8,550, a total of $65,550 per job.
So that's what a "created" job should cost. About $65,000.
If you actually want to "create jobs," that's how you should do it. Go out and create them.
But that's not how we do things. We were not goddamn Communists. Or even socialists. We're capitalists. So we give out contracts to private enterprises and grants to universities and other institutions.
Construction projects, one of the primary forms of job creation has lots of costs beside labor. They have machinery, materials, a variety of business expenses (accounting, insurance, legal, etc.), the purchase of land and so on. Labor accounts for 20-30 percent of a construction contract. Let's take the low end, 20 percent, and assume that a construction job is one of those $65,000 wages plus benefits for a full year jobs, and the cost of that job then becomes $325,000.
That's pretty close to the $353,125 per job number we got using the Moody's estimate.
Except that all those other construction costs (excluding land purchase, which should be less relevant here) involve additional labor. For example, materials are manufactured, a certain portion of them here, in the US. Truckers transport them. Building supply company employees handle them. Machinery is built (some portion of it here), and maintained (all of it here). The construction company pays it's staff and the professionals (lawyer and accountants), and so on. All those people buy food (keeping supermarket workers employed), buy other stuff, pay their bills, and so on.
This is the famous Keynesian multiplier effect.
It's also very difficult to calculate how many non-site, indirect jobs does a construction project support with all its other spending. In the figures we're using, that 80% of the costs. It's reasonable to say that at least half of that goes into people's pockets as it moves down the line.
If we figure it that way, it should probably cost about $130,000 per job.
Let's go back to the breakdown.
First let's take out the aid to the states for unemployment insurance assistance. Obviously that doesn't add jobs. It helps people. It goes to keeping the community afloat, but it doesn't create a whole lot of jobs.
Let's take out the tax cuts. Just as an academic exercise, for the moment.
That leaves projects, grants, and loans. $154.5 billion.
If we have 1,600,000 jobs created and saved, and divide it into the money spent on projects, it comes out at $96,562 per job.
That actually makes sense. It's expensive. But it makes sense.
Direct job creation, or job creation through contracts (like road building), has a multiplier effect. Each job creates more jobs, both through the support jobs and through the spending by the people who are employed.
Job creation through tax cuts works the opposite way.
The price per job is multiplied many times over.
In this last election cycle, Carl Paladino was running against Andrew Cuomo for governor of New York. One of the charges that Cuomo leveled against him was that he got $1.4 million in tax breaks but created only one job from that.
The implication was that Paladino was a sleazy rip-off artist. At best.
He may be, but it is only a particularly vivid example of how the tax cuts to job creation equation actually works.
We are still arguing about extending the Bush Tax Cuts.
The Bush Tax Cuts cost about two trillion dollars.
They were originally labeled and promoted as "jobs and stimulus" packages. Let's take him at his word. Over the course of his two terms 1.1 jobs were created. That didn't even keep up with population growth. It also cost $1,818,182 per job.
Close to the same numbers that Paladino was working with.
The Obama White House, a prisoner of the prevailing 'tax cuts stimulate the economy and create jobs' theology, passed a stimulus bill that was 40 percent tax cuts, 30 percent unemployment insurance, and only 27 percent actual stimulus.
That's why it didn't work.
That's not even the bad news.
Here's the bad news. The tax cuts are still in effect. The odds are they will be extended, even for the very wealthiest.
Here's worse news. There's only one thing stupider than cutting taxes to create jobs. It's to cut spending. In the recent NY governor's race, for example, both leading candidates promise to cut spending. That means cutting jobs. That's happening state by state all around the country. Not only does cutting jobs mean, in a very direct one-to-one way, fewer jobs, it has a negative multiplier effect. It means there are fewer people with money to spend on the things that create jobs for other people.
eric seiger
Obama 2012 - Doug Schoen - Fox <b>News</b> | Mediaite
Fox News' Democratic analysts have thrown President Obama under the bus: Doug Schoen and Pat Caddell suggested this weekend that the Democratic Party must cut off its head to stand a chance in 2012. Schoen was back on America Live ...
Breaking <b>News</b>: Humanities in Decline! Film at 11. — Crooked Timber
But I just don't know of any realm of human endeavor in which a precipitous decline from 1967 to 1987, followed by a couple of decades of stability, counts as breaking news. It's the equivalent of saying “sales of Sgt. Pepper posters ...
<b>News</b> on Feliciano and Upton at GM Meetings - Pinstripe Alley
News on Feliciano and Upton at GM Meetings. ... Do you like this story? More from Pinstripe Alley. The Tools of Ignorance: Saturday News. Nov 2010 by jscape2000 - 31 comments. Analyzing Joel Sherman's Post On The Catching Situation ...
eric seiger
eric seiger
eric seiger
Obama 2012 - Doug Schoen - Fox <b>News</b> | Mediaite
Fox News' Democratic analysts have thrown President Obama under the bus: Doug Schoen and Pat Caddell suggested this weekend that the Democratic Party must cut off its head to stand a chance in 2012. Schoen was back on America Live ...
Breaking <b>News</b>: Humanities in Decline! Film at 11. — Crooked Timber
But I just don't know of any realm of human endeavor in which a precipitous decline from 1967 to 1987, followed by a couple of decades of stability, counts as breaking news. It's the equivalent of saying “sales of Sgt. Pepper posters ...
<b>News</b> on Feliciano and Upton at GM Meetings - Pinstripe Alley
News on Feliciano and Upton at GM Meetings. ... Do you like this story? More from Pinstripe Alley. The Tools of Ignorance: Saturday News. Nov 2010 by jscape2000 - 31 comments. Analyzing Joel Sherman's Post On The Catching Situation ...
eric seiger
If, in the future, Republicans ever again ask "Where are the jobs?" it will be because they've forgotten where they buried the ones they killed. For now, though, it's clear they remember all too well.
Like a serial killer returning to a favorite dump site to reminisce or further ravage a corpse, Republicans are returning to the scene of the crime for a bit of fun with the still-fresh remains of 240,000 jobs the GOP killed off last month.
They're coming back for more. On Monday, the Republican Study Committee released this statement:
With the national debt quickly approaching $14 trillion, Washington needs to get serious about cutting spending. One option the next Congress should consider is to restore welfare reform, one of the most successful bipartisan initiatives of the 1990s.
The 1996 welfare reform law created incentives for states to help people get back on their feet and off of taxpayer assistance. However, the 2009 stimulus package created a new "emergency fund" under the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families program which actually incentivizes states to increase their welfare caseloads without requiring able-bodied individuals to work, get job training, or make other efforts to move off of taxpayer assistance. Specifically, a state must increase its welfare caseloads in order to receive any funding, and states receive an 80% match to cover all expenses associated with increasing their welfare caseloads. This costs taxpayers $2.5 billion each year.
Just a couple of points here.
First, thanks to the GOP's obstruction, the TANF Emergency Fund expired on September 30, 2010, effectively putting the 240,000 people who found work through the program out of work. (This must be one of those "We had to destroy the village in order to save it," moments — when conservatives have to kill jobs in order to create them.) It was funded at $5 billion over two years. Now it's dead. The GOP killed it. There have been efforts to extend it, but at a maximum of $2.5 billion.
Second, where does this business about not "requiring able-bodied individuals to work" come from? The Emergency fund has, in its brief existence, put people to work who want to work and would have been out of work otherwise. The money from the Emergency Fund was used by states to subsidize jobs programs that have successfully put "able bodied individuals to work" — including some 120,000 young people who would not have had summer jobs, and 130,000 parents who wouldn't have had jobs to provide for their families.
Some of the successes of the Emergency Fund include:
- South Carolina is using the program to provide jobs to parents who would otherwise be receiving cash assistance through the state's regular TANF (Temporary Assistance for Needy Families) program.
- Illinois has placed more than 20,000 individuals in jobs, far exceeding its original goal of 12,000 placements.
- Alabama is using the program to provide jobs to TANF recipients statewide, but has found it especially helpful in rural communities where very few job opportunities exist.
- North Dakota is providing jobs for unemployed non-custodial parents who don't have the financial resources to meet their child support.
- A rural community in Tennessee created 400 new jobs and helped reduce the county's unemployment rate from 27.3 to 18.6 percent over an eight-month period.
There's a whole lot more here, on how states used TANF to subsidize job programs and put people to work — people who would otherwise have just received cash assistance.
This, Republicans apparently believe, is a very bad thing. Maybe the GOP doesn't think these are "real" jobs. Maybe, like the aforementioned serial killer, the GOP just thinks some jobs need to die, because some jobs shouldn't exist in the first place. Likewise the people whose lives have gotten better because of those jobs.
The point is that the TANF Emergency Fund is an example of a safety net that works when the economy doesn't — like unemployment benefits keeping millions out of poverty — by putting hundreds of thousands of people back to work, where they can learn use their skills instead of lose them, and perhaps learn new skills that may lead to better jobs and better lives. If you want to talk about incentives, these are people who would otherwise have been collecting TANF cash benefits that aren't enough to meet basic needs.
Besides, if Republicans really want something to cut, there are far meatier parts of the budget just waiting for someone with a sharp knife.
One place Democrats could start fighting -- if they can find the backbone -- is to call out the new Republican Speaker Of The House John Boehner over his desire to trim the deficit with Draconian cuts in the federal budget. The word he used was "discretionary" funding. The largest discretionary line in the budget is the Pentagon.
This is a major pissing contest just waiting for somebody to begin the challenge. And the perfect place to start is for somebody to piss on Boehner's shoes
.The Pentagon budget is the largest elephant in the room that no one except the antiwar left will talk about. There is no good reason for this, since the crisis represented by the bloated Pentagon budget goes far beyond the anti-war movement, reaching into the lives of all working Americans. Sure, it will mean a fight, but fighting is good at this juncture - much better than laying down.
No, it's far far better for them to be unemployed and wait for the private sector to create jobs, when taxes and wages are finally low enough. The GOP has no immediate plans to create jobs to replace those they're so eager to kill off. Their best idea is a old, one one: cut taxes and hope for the best. We know what that got us last time: a decade of zero job growth.
That the 240,000 people who will be out of work again are unlikely to find work in the private sector hardly matters. When the people who had work through the TANF Emergency Fund are finally out of work, the GOP will probably deny them unemployment benefits, too, just for kicks.
Until then, there's still some fun to be had with the still-fresh corpse of the TANF Emergency Fund.
The stimulus package failed because it consisted mostly of tax cuts. Tax cuts are among the very worst ways to create jobs and certainly the most expensive.
The stimulus package authorizes 787 billion dollars. According to the official website (Recovery.gov) $565 billion has actually been spent or credited. There are three categories of "stimulus." Citing amounts spent, they are:
- $243.4 billion in tax cuts.
- $154.5 billion in contracts, grants, and loans. This is what we actually think of as a stimulus, construction and research projects.
- $166.8 billion in entitlements. This is mostly money to the states to help with unemployment insurance.
Estimates of jobs "saved and created" by the package range from 800,000 to 2.4 million (both from the Congressional Budget Office), with other estimates at 1.25 million (IHS/Global Insight), 1.06 million (Macroeconomic Advisors), and 1.59 million (Moody's).
Let's use Moody's estimate (sort of the high middle, and independent) and round it off to 1.6 million jobs "saved and created."
That's $353,125 per job.
I'm sorry, but that's ridiculous. It's obscene.
If you have an essentially unlimited line of credit, as the government essentially does, it would appear relatively easy to create jobs.
"Hey, you, over there on the unemployment line, wanna work cleaning up our national parks? Yeah, we'll give you a twenty dollar rake, some biodegradable garbage bags, and twenty bucks an hour." That happens to be 47 cents an hour over the average wage.
No national parks or monuments in your neighborhood?
All right, there are lots of empty lots and abandoned homes due to the housing market collapse. "Let's clean 'em up. Same deal. That's forty thousand a year. You can live on that."
Presumably the government will be decent about it and pay the usual benefits -- social security, unemployment insurance, workman's comp, and so on -- which adds $8.11 an hour. That's a little less than $17,000 a year, making a total cost of $57,000 per year, per job.
Jobs don't exist in a vacuum, not even sweeping the streets by hand with a broom. There has to be a certain number of overhead costs. Not counting salaries of supervisors and such (which would be part of the job creation numbers), not counting benefits (already in there), 15 percent is a very generous number, for another $8,550, a total of $65,550 per job.
So that's what a "created" job should cost. About $65,000.
If you actually want to "create jobs," that's how you should do it. Go out and create them.
But that's not how we do things. We were not goddamn Communists. Or even socialists. We're capitalists. So we give out contracts to private enterprises and grants to universities and other institutions.
Construction projects, one of the primary forms of job creation has lots of costs beside labor. They have machinery, materials, a variety of business expenses (accounting, insurance, legal, etc.), the purchase of land and so on. Labor accounts for 20-30 percent of a construction contract. Let's take the low end, 20 percent, and assume that a construction job is one of those $65,000 wages plus benefits for a full year jobs, and the cost of that job then becomes $325,000.
That's pretty close to the $353,125 per job number we got using the Moody's estimate.
Except that all those other construction costs (excluding land purchase, which should be less relevant here) involve additional labor. For example, materials are manufactured, a certain portion of them here, in the US. Truckers transport them. Building supply company employees handle them. Machinery is built (some portion of it here), and maintained (all of it here). The construction company pays it's staff and the professionals (lawyer and accountants), and so on. All those people buy food (keeping supermarket workers employed), buy other stuff, pay their bills, and so on.
This is the famous Keynesian multiplier effect.
It's also very difficult to calculate how many non-site, indirect jobs does a construction project support with all its other spending. In the figures we're using, that 80% of the costs. It's reasonable to say that at least half of that goes into people's pockets as it moves down the line.
If we figure it that way, it should probably cost about $130,000 per job.
Let's go back to the breakdown.
First let's take out the aid to the states for unemployment insurance assistance. Obviously that doesn't add jobs. It helps people. It goes to keeping the community afloat, but it doesn't create a whole lot of jobs.
Let's take out the tax cuts. Just as an academic exercise, for the moment.
That leaves projects, grants, and loans. $154.5 billion.
If we have 1,600,000 jobs created and saved, and divide it into the money spent on projects, it comes out at $96,562 per job.
That actually makes sense. It's expensive. But it makes sense.
Direct job creation, or job creation through contracts (like road building), has a multiplier effect. Each job creates more jobs, both through the support jobs and through the spending by the people who are employed.
Job creation through tax cuts works the opposite way.
The price per job is multiplied many times over.
In this last election cycle, Carl Paladino was running against Andrew Cuomo for governor of New York. One of the charges that Cuomo leveled against him was that he got $1.4 million in tax breaks but created only one job from that.
The implication was that Paladino was a sleazy rip-off artist. At best.
He may be, but it is only a particularly vivid example of how the tax cuts to job creation equation actually works.
We are still arguing about extending the Bush Tax Cuts.
The Bush Tax Cuts cost about two trillion dollars.
They were originally labeled and promoted as "jobs and stimulus" packages. Let's take him at his word. Over the course of his two terms 1.1 jobs were created. That didn't even keep up with population growth. It also cost $1,818,182 per job.
Close to the same numbers that Paladino was working with.
The Obama White House, a prisoner of the prevailing 'tax cuts stimulate the economy and create jobs' theology, passed a stimulus bill that was 40 percent tax cuts, 30 percent unemployment insurance, and only 27 percent actual stimulus.
That's why it didn't work.
That's not even the bad news.
Here's the bad news. The tax cuts are still in effect. The odds are they will be extended, even for the very wealthiest.
Here's worse news. There's only one thing stupider than cutting taxes to create jobs. It's to cut spending. In the recent NY governor's race, for example, both leading candidates promise to cut spending. That means cutting jobs. That's happening state by state all around the country. Not only does cutting jobs mean, in a very direct one-to-one way, fewer jobs, it has a negative multiplier effect. It means there are fewer people with money to spend on the things that create jobs for other people.
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Obama 2012 - Doug Schoen - Fox <b>News</b> | Mediaite
Fox News' Democratic analysts have thrown President Obama under the bus: Doug Schoen and Pat Caddell suggested this weekend that the Democratic Party must cut off its head to stand a chance in 2012. Schoen was back on America Live ...
Breaking <b>News</b>: Humanities in Decline! Film at 11. — Crooked Timber
But I just don't know of any realm of human endeavor in which a precipitous decline from 1967 to 1987, followed by a couple of decades of stability, counts as breaking news. It's the equivalent of saying “sales of Sgt. Pepper posters ...
<b>News</b> on Feliciano and Upton at GM Meetings - Pinstripe Alley
News on Feliciano and Upton at GM Meetings. ... Do you like this story? More from Pinstripe Alley. The Tools of Ignorance: Saturday News. Nov 2010 by jscape2000 - 31 comments. Analyzing Joel Sherman's Post On The Catching Situation ...
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Obama 2012 - Doug Schoen - Fox <b>News</b> | Mediaite
Fox News' Democratic analysts have thrown President Obama under the bus: Doug Schoen and Pat Caddell suggested this weekend that the Democratic Party must cut off its head to stand a chance in 2012. Schoen was back on America Live ...
Breaking <b>News</b>: Humanities in Decline! Film at 11. — Crooked Timber
But I just don't know of any realm of human endeavor in which a precipitous decline from 1967 to 1987, followed by a couple of decades of stability, counts as breaking news. It's the equivalent of saying “sales of Sgt. Pepper posters ...
<b>News</b> on Feliciano and Upton at GM Meetings - Pinstripe Alley
News on Feliciano and Upton at GM Meetings. ... Do you like this story? More from Pinstripe Alley. The Tools of Ignorance: Saturday News. Nov 2010 by jscape2000 - 31 comments. Analyzing Joel Sherman's Post On The Catching Situation ...
eric seiger
Obama 2012 - Doug Schoen - Fox <b>News</b> | Mediaite
Fox News' Democratic analysts have thrown President Obama under the bus: Doug Schoen and Pat Caddell suggested this weekend that the Democratic Party must cut off its head to stand a chance in 2012. Schoen was back on America Live ...
Breaking <b>News</b>: Humanities in Decline! Film at 11. — Crooked Timber
But I just don't know of any realm of human endeavor in which a precipitous decline from 1967 to 1987, followed by a couple of decades of stability, counts as breaking news. It's the equivalent of saying “sales of Sgt. Pepper posters ...
<b>News</b> on Feliciano and Upton at GM Meetings - Pinstripe Alley
News on Feliciano and Upton at GM Meetings. ... Do you like this story? More from Pinstripe Alley. The Tools of Ignorance: Saturday News. Nov 2010 by jscape2000 - 31 comments. Analyzing Joel Sherman's Post On The Catching Situation ...
eric seiger
Obama 2012 - Doug Schoen - Fox <b>News</b> | Mediaite
Fox News' Democratic analysts have thrown President Obama under the bus: Doug Schoen and Pat Caddell suggested this weekend that the Democratic Party must cut off its head to stand a chance in 2012. Schoen was back on America Live ...
Breaking <b>News</b>: Humanities in Decline! Film at 11. — Crooked Timber
But I just don't know of any realm of human endeavor in which a precipitous decline from 1967 to 1987, followed by a couple of decades of stability, counts as breaking news. It's the equivalent of saying “sales of Sgt. Pepper posters ...
<b>News</b> on Feliciano and Upton at GM Meetings - Pinstripe Alley
News on Feliciano and Upton at GM Meetings. ... Do you like this story? More from Pinstripe Alley. The Tools of Ignorance: Saturday News. Nov 2010 by jscape2000 - 31 comments. Analyzing Joel Sherman's Post On The Catching Situation ...
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Obama 2012 - Doug Schoen - Fox <b>News</b> | Mediaite
Fox News' Democratic analysts have thrown President Obama under the bus: Doug Schoen and Pat Caddell suggested this weekend that the Democratic Party must cut off its head to stand a chance in 2012. Schoen was back on America Live ...
Breaking <b>News</b>: Humanities in Decline! Film at 11. — Crooked Timber
But I just don't know of any realm of human endeavor in which a precipitous decline from 1967 to 1987, followed by a couple of decades of stability, counts as breaking news. It's the equivalent of saying “sales of Sgt. Pepper posters ...
<b>News</b> on Feliciano and Upton at GM Meetings - Pinstripe Alley
News on Feliciano and Upton at GM Meetings. ... Do you like this story? More from Pinstripe Alley. The Tools of Ignorance: Saturday News. Nov 2010 by jscape2000 - 31 comments. Analyzing Joel Sherman's Post On The Catching Situation ...
eric seiger
Obama 2012 - Doug Schoen - Fox <b>News</b> | Mediaite
Fox News' Democratic analysts have thrown President Obama under the bus: Doug Schoen and Pat Caddell suggested this weekend that the Democratic Party must cut off its head to stand a chance in 2012. Schoen was back on America Live ...
Breaking <b>News</b>: Humanities in Decline! Film at 11. — Crooked Timber
But I just don't know of any realm of human endeavor in which a precipitous decline from 1967 to 1987, followed by a couple of decades of stability, counts as breaking news. It's the equivalent of saying “sales of Sgt. Pepper posters ...
<b>News</b> on Feliciano and Upton at GM Meetings - Pinstripe Alley
News on Feliciano and Upton at GM Meetings. ... Do you like this story? More from Pinstripe Alley. The Tools of Ignorance: Saturday News. Nov 2010 by jscape2000 - 31 comments. Analyzing Joel Sherman's Post On The Catching Situation ...
eric seiger
Obama 2012 - Doug Schoen - Fox <b>News</b> | Mediaite
Fox News' Democratic analysts have thrown President Obama under the bus: Doug Schoen and Pat Caddell suggested this weekend that the Democratic Party must cut off its head to stand a chance in 2012. Schoen was back on America Live ...
Breaking <b>News</b>: Humanities in Decline! Film at 11. — Crooked Timber
But I just don't know of any realm of human endeavor in which a precipitous decline from 1967 to 1987, followed by a couple of decades of stability, counts as breaking news. It's the equivalent of saying “sales of Sgt. Pepper posters ...
<b>News</b> on Feliciano and Upton at GM Meetings - Pinstripe Alley
News on Feliciano and Upton at GM Meetings. ... Do you like this story? More from Pinstripe Alley. The Tools of Ignorance: Saturday News. Nov 2010 by jscape2000 - 31 comments. Analyzing Joel Sherman's Post On The Catching Situation ...
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