[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 155 (2009), Part 18]
[House]
[Page 24332]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]




               SAVING A MILLION JOBS AT $787,000 PER JOB

  The SPEAKER pro tempore. Under a previous order of the House, the 
gentlewoman from North Carolina (Ms. Foxx) is recognized for 5 minutes.
  Ms. FOXX. Madam Speaker, in a column last month for RealClearMarkets, 
businessman Bill Frezza took on the idea that the stimulus package had 
somehow ``saved'' jobs in America. He writes:
  ``The White House Council of Economic Advisers said Thursday the $787 
billion stimulus plan kept 1 million people working who would otherwise 
not have had jobs.
  ``You wouldn't let me stand up and make the simplistic claim that 
these million jobs were saved at a cost of $787,000 per job without 
challenging the details of my accounting, would you? Surely reality is 
more complex.
  ``But when the White House Council of Economic Advisers calculated 
the number of jobs saved by our government's massive stimulus spending, 
how is it that they entirely neglected to account for the impact on 
employment of removing $787 billion from the balance sheet of the 
private economy?''
  He continues by discussing those from the White House Council of 
Economic Advisers who make these dubious claims about the so-called 
``saved'' jobs:
  ``They never had to meet a payroll,'' Mr. Frezza writes. ``They never 
had to raise money to fund their businesses from skeptical investors. 
They never bet their life savings on their own business judgment. They 
never had to scramble to pay off a banker who called in a loan. They 
never had to decide whether to take a calculated risk to expand their 
workforce, hoping to take market share from a fierce competitor. They 
never had to make a judgment call on whether or not to launch an 
unproven new product. They never had to manage a new reduction in 
force, explaining to employees that their jobs have been eliminated 
because the tax and regulatory burdens imposed by some new law forced 
them to cut costs.
  ``They never lost business to a government-subsidized competitor 
whose cost of capital was vastly lower than theirs. They never had to 
grease the palms of politicians offering constituent services to 
resolve a bureaucratic hangup caused by the labyrinthine government 
approvals these selfsame politicians inflict on many businesses.
  ``They never had to deal with a missed sales forecast caused by an 
economy so roiled by capricious and uncertain fiscal policy that 
frightened customers were holding back orders. They never had to deal 
with a key supplier that unexpectedly went bankrupt because their 
source of credit dried up as dollars got sucked out of the commercial 
economy into government debt. They never had to negotiate with angry 
landlords after being forced to shut down a business destroyed by 
spurious mass-manufactured class-action suits. They never had to stand 
up in front of disappointed investors to explain why they lost money 
that had been entrusted to them.
  ``And you can be sure that none of them ever fell on their face and 
had to pick themselves up, dust themselves off, and decide whether it 
was worth going through all the joys described above to take another 
shot at building a business from scratch.''
  Then he launches into his final broadside against the assumption of 
the council's economists:
  ``All three have Ph.D.s from fancy universities,'' he writes. ``They 
are prize-winning experts in macroeconomics. To have come this far, you 
can bet they are ambitious, articulate, well connected, and brilliant. 
Yet when the Council of Economic Advisers did its calculations to 
determine the numbers of jobs saved by the stimulus, they shamelessly 
counted assets and totally ignored liabilities.
  ``People this smart cannot be easily fooled. People so visibly in the 
public eye cannot remain willfully blind.
  ``No, these people and those who appointed them are cunningly smart. 
It's we who are the fools for listening to them. Long after these 
experts return to their sinecures in academia to train another 
generation of economists on the wisdom of central planning and 
Keynesian pump priming, it's we and our children and our grandchildren 
who will be paying the price.''

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