Even taking the CBO numbers as gospel, that's over $240,000 per job! Not exactly a number to be crowing about.
Why not? That's a lot of money. It's about the amount that I have earned since I started my own job (unrelated to the stimulus, as far as I know), but I hope that my current position will earn me quite a bit deal more, eventually. I'm aware too of course, that the existence of my position has cost my employer a lot more than what I have taken home; as it has to pay for my health insurance, office space, computer, utilities usage, they have bought me a laptop, and have reimbursed other capital expenses. And I'm aware, also that the project that I am on with several other people has required hundreds of thousands of dollars in invested capital in terms of infrastructure, but this cost would be spread across several jobs. In any case, I am aware finally that my employer could have, instead of hiring me to do productive work, thrown much less money and capital at my project, and hired double or triple the number of people to stand around and shovel dirt from one hole to another, then from the destination hole back to the original. Of course, it wouldn't be very productive and would be less desirable than straight out welfare, but it would certainly have padded the dollars-to-jobs figures, were that the main goal.
That assumes that it would have been used for other purposes to begin with (and not things like
stock buybacks or creating jobs overseas; the entire premise of Keynesian economics is that slack exists.
