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Obama says the goal of the stimulus is to create 3 million jobs. If you divide the $900 billion by 3 million jobs, you see that this stimulus will cost $300,000 per job - if it's successful.
If we decided that we wanted to create 3 million jobs that paid $50,000, we could give businesses that money as long as they employed people for at least a year. The cost of that would be $150 billion.
Could someone please pass along this info to Obama ASAP?
The OP's WaPo article details that they're aware of the pitfalls and are organizing to meet the challenges. Page 2 is interesting, details past squandering of billions that this Admin firmly intends to avoid.
Panic led to waste after 9/11 and Katrina. "Government contractors interviewed job applicants at five-star resorts and hotels, where auditors found they paid $1,180 for 20 gallons of Starbucks coffee, $1,540 to rent extension cords at one hotel and $5.4 million for nine months salary to the head of the event-planning firm that ran the show." "In the rush to respond to the devastation of Hurricane Katrina, federal authorities issued more than $10 billion in contracts, only about 30 percent through full-and-open competition, studies have found. The government ended up spending $2.7 billion on mostly no-bid contracts for 145,000 trailers and mobile homes, including 8,000 that were never used and 41,000 now being sold at 40 cents on the dollar."
"Multiple causes -- including poor planning, noncompetitive awards, abuse of contract flexibilities, inadequate oversight and corruption -- have all played a part."
That's what the Obama Admin plans to avoid. The WaPo article just gives some fretting that this or that might go wrong, but it also gives information on the efforts being made to get this right.
At the end of the day this is still the largest spending bill in the history of the world. And they are trying to rush through it.
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