Dan Gainor writes in a Sept. 15 MRC Business & Media Institute post (and CNSNews.com item):
The Washington Post might be a day late and $38 billion short, but it’s being honest about Barack Obama’s failed green jobs program. According to the Post, the “$38.6 billion loan guarantee program” has created just “3,545 new, permanent jobs” “after giving out almost half the allocated amount.”
For those not doing the math at home, that means more than $5 million per job.
Only, not so much. As former White House economist Jared Bernstein details, the government didn’t actually spend $38.6 billion on the loan guarantee program — that assumes that all the loans will go bad, an extremely unlikely occurrence. The actual cost of bad loans that will result in the government covering for them will likely end up being under $5 billion, which Bernstein points out “gets you into a much more reasonable neighborhood re bang-for-buck.”
Oops.