Posted by
Old Retired Fart on Saturday, December 06, 2008 1:25:04 PM
Was digging around a little this morning and found some facts and figures on government "infrastructure" projects. After Hurricane Katrina here in Louisiana, we had "Project Blue Roof" to install tarps on houses damaged by the hurricane. For the average 1500 square foot roof, the government paid the primary contractor $2250 (pretty similar to the cost of a basic three-tab roof, but that is another story). By the time the money had passed through hands and gotten to the only person who actually had a job installing that tarp he got between $30 and $50. Extrapolating that math each of those 40,000 jobs Obama spoke of would pay $555 a year. Or another way of looking at it, he could actually "create" about 900 $25K jobs for 1 year with a billion dollars.
Now if those same $1 billion are put into the hands of consumers, and assuming that they will spend 90% and save 10% (pretty high savings assumption), the result would be a $10 billion kick in the economy. Seems like a no-brainer to me.