Even economic reports that some in the media try to use as a cheerleader for the “Stimulus” show the policy’s poor results. Alan Blinder (Princeton Univ) and Mark Zandi (Moody’s Economy) recently released a report titled “How US Policy Ended the Great Recession.” Geoff at Innocent Bystanders looks into the report’s findings:

That’s a nice spin, but if you read the report, does it truly say that the “financial rescue and stimulus” were responsible for “saving or creating 8.5 million jobs?” Not really. The report actually places most of the credit on the changes in financial policy & TARP.

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According to Blinder & Zandi, we’ve spent $391 billion in stimulus money in “now” dollars, to get a GDP increase of $340 billion (in 2005 dollars), so we lost $51 billion. Lost $51 billion. If you adjust for inflation, it only cost us about $10 billion, but the point is that rather than spending the money in a way that has a big economic multiplier, it’s been spent with a economic multiplier less than 1.

They also tell us that their modeling predicts that the stimulus itself was responsible for 2.5 million jobs. If you simply take that at face value, and divide it into the $391 billion spent thus far, you find that each job cost us more than $150K. Yep – each job over that 18 month period cost us $100K/yr.

Via Ace:

… if Obama had actually dropped the money out of airplanes he would have gotten at least $391 billion out of it. He actually managed to lose $51 billion in the process.