FACT CHECK: GOP math suspect in stimulus debate - Yahoo! News
WASHINGTON – Beware the math. Some Republican lawmakers critical of President Barack Obama's stimulus package are using grade-school arithmetic to size up costs and consequences of all that spending. The math is satisfyingly simple but highly misleading.
It goes like this: Divide the stimulus money spent so far by the estimated number of jobs saved or created. That produces a rather frightening figure on how much money taxpayers are spending for each job.
On Friday, the White House released estimates that $160 billion in stimulus spending created or preserved 650,000 direct jobs.
By the critics' calculations, that's over $246,000 a job — and a terrible deal for taxpayers. Why spend nearly $250,000 to employ a highway worker or a teacher making a small fraction of that?
The reality is more complex.
First, the naysayers' calculations ignore the value of the work produced.....
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