The most interesting thing of the moment: $358,243.46 per job

Wednesday, November 18, 2009

$358,243.46 per job

According to recovery.gov, the 2nd congressional district of Utah has received $802,465,348 from the federal government in stimulus money and has saved 2,240.3 jobs. Doing the simple math with big numbers, that gives us $358,243.46 for each job. Those are some big numbers that pose lots of questions:

How do you save 3/10 of a job?
How do they know so precisely how many jobs were saved?
How much are the people working these jobs getting?
How are we going to pay for all this?

What the website does not detail is what the money is actually spent on. From the FAQ we read how the jobs saved is computed:

Recipients calculate the number of jobs created or saved by taking the total number of Recovery Act funded hours worked in a quarter, and dividing it by the number of hours of a full-time schedule in a quarter as defined by the Recipient.

In essence, a project is funded with recovery funds and then the number of hours working on the project is divided in money spent to get the number of jobs saved. What we don't know is how many of the projects would have been done anyway. Oh well, it is as good a guess as any.

Now, what if instead of funding the projects, they simply divided the money among all the unemployed in the state. Again, according to recovery.gov, Utah has been awarded $1,502,981,542. The is one and a half billion, dollars. Then a recent article on unemployment in Utah, 84,300 Utahns are out of work. Doing the simple math on big numbers again that means $17,828.96 for every unemployed person on Utah.

Actually, Utah has a cool recovery site. In it we find that the Davis School District has spent $722,698 for 5 full time teaching positions. That works out the $144,539.60 for each teacher. Either school teachers are making a lot more money than they claim or where is the money going? Another $11,000,000 is being spent on Assist in providing special education and related services to children with disabilities in accordance with Part B of the IDEA. That is a lot of assistance. Another 2.8 million is going to weatherize 300 low income homes, almost $10,000 per home.

Last example, $31,367,800 was spent to retain 174 employees of the SLCC arts program which works out to $180,274.71 per employee. Were they really going to get rid of the entire art department? Are the employees getting paid that much? Those art degrees really pay off.

These are all noble causes. But, it seems like the money could go a lot further. There are some good things being done but couldn't more be done? Teachers don't make that much money, weatherizing doesn't cost that much and jobs don't average over $300,000 a year, at least in this state.