So I’ve been seeing many tweets today from @PoliticalMath regarding the data from Recovery.gov. Among my favorites was:

CA zip code 95814 added 75,000 jobs. Population: 16,600. That’s 5 jobs per person! http://bit.ly/14Uijc

As I read into the issue more I found that much of the jobs “saved or created” went to government agencies as this BigGovernment.com blog post shows:

But the most relevant information on Recovery.gov is that most of the jobs created or saved are in the public sector. For instance, according to Vice President Biden, out of the 640,329 jobs, 325,000 went to education and 80,000 to construction jobs. The difference we will soon find out is going to other government jobs. You need more evidence? 13,080 grants went to the private sector, and 116,625 went to [federal] agencies.

Even when the money went to private ventures was completely wasted:

First, $159 billion has been spent so far. That’s $248,273 per job. However, when you look at some specific contracts that were awarded you find that some jobs were created or saved at an insane cost to taxpayers. For instance, $1,359,633,501 were awarded to CH2M WG IDAHO LLC, in WA to create 2,183 jobs. That’s $622,827 per job. That’s not as bad though as the $258,646,800 awarded to the Brookhaven Science Associates, LLC in NY, to create 25 jobs. That’s over $10.3 million per job.

The whole stimulus is a joke and it always has been. Many conservatives complained about this boondoggle far before it was a law. When will the liberals learn you can’t buy your way out of a bad economy. You can in fact deregulate and lower taxes to improve and encourage the economy. Instead they have focused on ways to spend and regulate more. There is an excellent video from Reason.com about the a private analysis of stimulus spending by Recovery.org. Cross-posted at RightSideofTech.com