WisPolitics carried a press release from the Doyle administration claiming that just short of $680 million in 1st-reporting-quarter Porkulus spending “created” or “saved” 8,284 full-time jobs, including over 6,100 “essential” government jobs “saved” (e.g. firefighters, police offers and teachers). Doc over at The Autopsy hammers for effect on the “essential saved” jobs:
And let’s be honest, this is a little bit of legerdemain. Do you think Wisconsin would really lay off 6100 firefighters, policemen and teachers? Of course not. That would be political suicide for Democrats as each is unionized. (I’m a teacher in a public school, and I’ve lost 5% of my income.) So did the stimulus really “save” those jobs? No. What it did was allow the state to say they would have cut those jobs had there been no stimulus.
As an analogy, suppose I get $100,000 from a benefactor, then say, “Thank goodness I got the money, or I would have had to sell my kids for medical experiments!” Would I really sell my kids? Of course not. But that’s the impression I’m giving by saying they were “saved” by the $100,000 donation.
Not to be outdone, Republican Party of Wisconsin chair Reince Priebus said:
The Doyle Administration’s announcement that its use of stimulus dollars has lead to saving or creating 8,284 state jobs is an embarrassment to our state. Not only did these ‘jobs’ come at a cost of over $82,000 each, policies like combined reporting and higher taxes have cost Wisconsin over 130,000 jobs in the past year alone. Doyle and the Democrats are out of touch and out of ideas, and, sadly, Wisconsin is out of jobs because of their failed policies.
I’ll point back to something the Fond du Lac Reporter noted when the Fond du Lac County Board rammed home a massive tax increase for the benefit of Mercury Marine – for a tax subsidy to an employer to make economic sense, it should be somewhere on the order of $20,000 per job. Last I checked, $82,000 is well above $20,000.
The biggest laugh is White House-mandated math that allows the state to claim those over-6,100 jobs “saved” and less-than-2,100 jobs “created” (assuming that any were actually “created” as opposed to “saved”) as a direct result of Porkulus “created or saved” 22,100 jobs over 6 months and will “create or save” 70,000 jobs over the 2 years of Porkulus. There is no way that a government job creates almost 3 private-sector jobs over 6 months or 9 private-sector jobs over 2 years.
Even if that were the case, note how many jobs Wisconsin has lost over the last year with the various new taxes and the cratering of the economy – 130,000. That is what is called an EPIC FAIL.
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