bailout package

The Not So Good, the Bad, and the Really Ugly

by Jonathan Tolman on January 21, 2009 · 4 comments

in Bailout Watch, Deregulate to Stimulate, Economy, Features, Stimulus to Nowhere, Zeitgeist

Not all stimulus programs are created equal. If the goal of the latest economic bailout package that Congress is considering is as President Elect Obama has declared, job creation, there is a significant disparity between many of the programs.  While only 39 of the variously appropriated federal programs even attempt to quantify the number of jobs that they would create, there is a huge disparity in how effective various programs are at job creation — ranging from $1,000,000 per job created down to $16,000 per job created.

For a bill that is designed to stimulate job creation, it is disgraceful that Congress would appropriate any money for programs where the agency has not even attempted to estimated the number of jobs that the appropriation would generate. For the few programs that have estimated the number of jobs created there are obviously some that are economically more efficient than others. And Congress should certainly direct resources to those programs that would maximize the job benefit for the buck. At a minimum, Congress should focus on those programs that are more rather than less efficient. If a program cannot even estimate the number of jobs that if would create, that program certainly doesn’t qualify for emergency economic recovery legislation. Congress should insist on knowing how many jobs a program is estimated to generate before appropriating huge sums of American taxpayer dollars.

Here is a list of programs from the stimulus bill and  the estimated cost per job.

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Bailout: Where it all went wrong for McCain

by Iain Murray on November 4, 2008 · 3 comments

in Bailout Watch, Economy, Politics as Usual

Assuming, as most nonpartisan observers do, that Sen. Obama is walking away with this election today, it might behoove Republicans and their supporters to ask why a seemingly close election in early September got away from them so badly. For one potential answer, I can do no better than point them to The Short View on Financial Times TV (general link here). In the episode for yesterday, November 3rd, John Authers points once again, as he has several times before, to the correlation between the turn in Sen. McCain’s fortunes and the collapse of Lehmann Bros. Frank Luntz is one of many to have suggested that the failure of the McCain campaign to react by opposing the Administration’s bailout package was decisive. As Frank says,

That decision alone would have made him a hero to tens of millions of hard-working middle-class voters who resent seeing their tax dollars handed over to fund the retirement packages of the Billionaire Boys Club. But he didn’t.

In short, it’s the economy, stupid. Surprisingly for a self-described maverick, it appears to have been Sen. McCain’s desire to cling to the self-serving nostrums of Wall Street and the Beltway that doomed him.