CNS News reported yesterday that the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) has issued a report entitled, “Estimated Impact of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act on Employment and Economic Output from October Through December 2010.”

The CBO reported that the Stimulus Act cost a total of $821 billion, rather than the $787 billion originally estimated.  The CBO report estimated that in the last quarter of 2010, between 1.3 million and 3.5 million people were employed due to the Stimulus Act.  In the third quarter of 2010, the number was somewhere between 1.4 million and 3.6 million.  If you do the math, that makes the cost of each job between $228,055 (for the 3.6 million number) and $586,428 (for the 1.4 million number).  Where can I go to get one of those jobs?  Somehow I think the private sector can produce jobs much more efficiently if only the government would leave it alone.

The article points out:

“In February 2009, when President Obama signed the stimulus law the national unemployment rate was 8.2 percent, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. In January 2011, the national unemployment rate was 9.0 percent.”

There is no way to know what the unemployment rate would be at the present time if the stimulus had not been passed.  We do know, however, that much of the stimulus money went to public sector workers to insure that union workers would not be laid off.  Obviously this does nothing to solve a long-term unemployment problem.  If the stimulus money had come in the form of a tax cut, letting people keep more of their own money, we might now have the lower unemployment rate the stimulus was supposed to create.