Did the Stimulus Create Jobs? The government's own job creation data reveal the dangers of a second stimulus

Veronique de Rugy (Reason.com)
Last week the White House held a jobs summit with academics and lawmakers to come up with a strategy for job creation. The result of their cogitation was presented by President Barack Obama on Tuesday during a speech at the Brookings Institution. The plan includes a wide-ranging new jobs program focused on infrastructure investment, small-business initiatives, and aid to state and local governments.

Sound familiar? It should, because this new plan is nothing more than a repeat of the first job creation program—the so-called stimulus plan—signed into law by the administration back in February.

Back then, the White House claimed that if we passed the $789 billion American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, unemployment would be contained and jobs would be created immediately.

The chart below illustrates how well, or not, that job creation program has worked so far. Using the most recent data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics and data from the Administration’s website Recovery.gov, it shows the number of jobs lost and the number of jobs “created or saved” between February and October 2009 by state. This chart also assumes, for the sake of argument, that the concept of a “created or saved” job is not a completely fictitious and unverifiable metric of the effectiveness of the stimulus....

Read the whole article with an astounding chart and links:

http://reason.com/archives/2009/12/11/did-the-stimulus-create-jobs