The Fake Jobs Test

Andrew Stiles notes in the Corner that, if you buy economists’ projections (which I don’t), President Obama’s (DOA) “jobs plan” would cost $1.6 million per job.

Here is a puzzle: Why don’t lefties ever seem to actually care about the cost-per-unit-benefit of the thing they propose? Let’s accept for the sake of argument that the biggest problem with the economy is that there aren’t enough Jobs, that the government should spend some public money to Create Jobs, and that the more Jobs the government can Create the better (none of which I really buy). Given that public monies are not infinite, wouldn’t you assume that the left, and/or ‘Keynesians’, would want to spend said money efficiently?

For each $1.6 million per job we could just make up 2 completely-fake jobs paying $80k/year and pre-fund them for 10 years. Literally fake jobs: person comes in, sits down, does nothing. For ten years. $80k/year. This would cost the same amount of money but ‘create’ twice as many Jobs! For longer time! And through the magic of The Multiplier™, each of those people with a newfangled fake $80k/year job would go out and spend their money on granite TVs and flat-screen countertops and whatnot, thereby Creating other Jobs, and so on, and so forth, in the holy Keynesian (PBUH) geometrically-convergent infinite series we have all come to believe in so faithfully.

Given this obviously superior option, why would anyone on earth be in favor of Obama’s “jobs plan” instead? It fails the fake-jobs test from the start.

If leftist political-economics were rational, it would always hold itself up to the minimal standard of clearing this hurdle: “Is the thing we’re proposing superior in cost-benefit terms to just splitting the cost among the purported beneficiaries and handing that amount to them directly?” If yes, then let’s have a discussion, but if not, what are we even talking about?

One might suggest, if he were cynical, that Creating Jobs as such isn’t, contrary to rhetoric, their primary aim after all, and that spending maximal money. Both so that they can have more leverage to force a raise in taxes, and so that the amount of money under the control of the right people – the Smart People such as those who gave half a billion to Solyndra for nothing – is maximized.

Signed,
Deeply Cynical