EPA Stimulus Jobs
I had a lot of negative comments after my post earlier this week on how much money was being spent on each job created and/or saved by the Economic Stimulus law of last year. So let's do some of that again.
My rather "elementary" math was ridiculed by a number of people, who said I was comparing apples to oranges, proving I could never be an economist and more that wasn't fit to print.
So since I aggravated a lot of readers, I thought I would dig down even further into some of the numbers.
The Environmental Protection Agency reports that it has sent out $7.1 billion in recovery act funding for a variety of projects related to air quality, clean drinking water and more. (The EPA is authorized to spend $7.22 billion.)
"To date, the agency's recovery act funding has saved or created 6,750 jobs in communities across the country," read a press release issued on Thursday by the EPA.
Those are the numbers we will work with.
If you divide $7.1 billion - the amount of money spent - by 6,750 - the number of jobs saved and/or created by this chunk of money, you get $1,051,851.85.
That's over one million dollars in spending per created job by the EPA.
That isn't a salary figure - that is the full cost of all the equipment, bureaucratic overhead and more involved in creating/saving that job. I may not be a math major, but I can still use a calculator.
But judging from comments about my blog this week, it might not be acceptable to just take that $7.1 billion figure and divide it by the number of jobs produced (6,750) to get a rudimentary average cost per job.
Okay, I'm ready to be told that my numbers are wrong. Have at it.
