The improved highways and bridges funded by transportation spending will last for decades, says John Horsley, executive director of the American Association of State Highway and Transportation Officials."You not only get a short-term shot in the arm for those whose jobs are saved or generated, but you get a long-lasting, concrete benefit to the economy," Horsley said.
It turns out that research jobs are the least expensive to produce (three cheers for science). Because there is much less overhead for a researcher, a majority of the funding goes directly to salary. This is why the cost per job for research is just $60K.
The Stimulus funding directed at the National Science Foundation does even better than that:
Besides school funding, the analysis found, the stimulus programs with the lowest per-job costs included: $94.6 million for states' administration of unemployment aid, $29.7 million in research funding by the National Science Foundation and $22.6 million for the National Endowment for the Arts. All funded more than 1,000 jobs at less than $30,000 each.
Price per job, however, isn't the only metric for success.
Construction projects are more likely to provide work for the unemployed than green energy research because of the high jobless rate among construction workers, said Stanford University economist Michael Boskin.
"There are not a lot of unemployed researchers out there," said Boskin, who was an economic adviser to President George H.W. Bush. "It's hard to believe that funding for green energy research is sopping up people who got laid off in construction."
According to the Congressional Budget Office (the non-partisan scorekeeper of legislation costs and benefits), the Stimulus funding has been a real benefit to the econonmy. Check out this blog post from the CBO Director (yes, the CBO Director has a blog)
CBO estimates that in the fourth quarter of calendar year 2009, ARRA added between 1.0 million and 2.1 million to the number of workers employed in the United States, and it increased the number of full-time-equivalent (FTE) jobs by between 1.4 million and 3.0 million. Increases in FTE jobs include shifts from part-time to full-time work or overtime and are thus generally larger than increases in the number of employed workers. CBO also estimates that real (inflation-adjusted) gross domestic product (GDP) was 1.5 percent to 3.5 percent higher in the fourth quarter than would have been the case in the absence of ARRA.
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Thanks for bringing this to my attention. $500,000 per construction job, wow! I guess I was stuck on the cost of a shovel.
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