Shoveling poop

The administration just spent $787 billion in a direct stimulus package meant to create or save jobs.

So how is it doing?

The best data from the administration itself suggests only 30,083 jobs have been saved or created, albeit officials in the government are claiming that this number is only representative of $16 billion out of $339 billion awarded.

Now readers will know that my math skills are not what they should be – probably too much indoctrination and not enough “reading, writin and rithmatic” as a child. Anyway, if you do some calculator dancing, we get this:

$16 billion divided by 30,000 jobs = $533,333 per job.

I’m not Tim Gheithner or even my old high-school math teacher, Gloria Isles, but I’m pretty confident I’ve got that right. Only one problem with that – well, there’s more than one problem, really. But here’s the one that gets me. If you take the average steel-monkey or jackhammer job and calculate out annual wages on the high side, that might be $22 an hour. That gives you a monthly paycheck of $3,520. Half of which will go to taxes. Leaving you $1,760 a month and a total of $21,120 per year.

So, out of curiosity, I took the money spent on creating each job by the administration and discovered this:

It would take the average schmuck in their “shovel-ready” job 25 years to make $528,000 after taxes.

So even if we accept the premise that the $16 billion created 30,083 jobs, which would pay out $528,000 in wages over 25 years, we would have to also accept that it would take 25 years for the taxes on those jobs to pay that $16 billion back. In the meantime, what else is happening with the rest of the money – you know… the other $323 billion awarded; or on the high side, the other $771 billion in the stimulus package as a whole?

Interesting question, isn’t it?

Because if you take every single remaining dollar allegedly acquired for stimulus - $771 billion, and put it all toward jobs – using the 30,083 as an example of what you’re going to get – you end up with the following:

$771 billion divided by $16 billion multiplied by 30,083 = 1,445,625 jobs generated.

That’s if you spend every last cent, and remember, since half is going back into taxes, it will take 25 years to pay it all back assuming every one of those million and a half workers stays on the payroll and keeps working that shovel for all that time.

The important thing here is that all this requires the government money actually be real and not just the product of some kind of out-of-control printing press. It requires for these million and a half jobs created – that the job creation trend continues at this amazing pace.

So how long would it take for all these jobs to be created and the remaining $771 billion to be spent? Well, at the current break-neck pace the government is travelling at, we can calculate it this way:

8 months = $16 million so – 771 divided by 16 = 48.1875 multiplied by 8 = 385.5 which if we divide that by 12, should give us the number of years it will take to shell out the remainder of the money and create our million and a half jobs.

According to my high school math skills – which aren’t so sharp because I never learned songs like “Barack Hussein Obama – mmm mmm mmm,” I have come to the conclusion that it would take the government another 32 years to create those jobs at their current pace.

By that time, the first jackhammer Joes will have been retired from duty for seven years and receiving retirement and Social Security (if it even still exists). Barack Hussein Obama mmm mmm mmm would be about 80 years old. To put that into perspective – Jimmy Carter, the captain at the wheel of the last great recession is currently 85 years old. Have you seen Jimmy lately? Have you heard some of the wild stuff Jimmy’s been saying? Those statements are almost as wild as Obama's when he said he would create 2.5 million jobs. But hey, he's only about a million off, and nowhere did he say how long it might take.

But Barack Hussein Obama will be about 80-years-old when the last of our shovel-ready jobs is created and our great-grandchildren pick up the shovel. Makes you wonder what we’re really shoveling all that time – like maybe it’s all just a big mountain of poop, or a giant pyramid, like the one on our dollar bill and the ones in Egypt which allegedly took generations of workers to erect. Yep. That's what we're building - a poop pyramid - metaphorically speaking. Because in this case, we're not really building anything.

Thirty-two years and $787 billion dollars later.

Mmm mmm mmm.