It’s Worse Than We Thought!

Conn Carroll / April 18, 2008

Yesterday we detailed why Barack Obama’s high-tax/high-spending plan to grow the economy was doomed to fail. On the spending side we highlighted that Obama promises to spend $60 billion on infrastructure that he claims will create 2 million new jobs. In addition to pointing out that some studies concluded that these new jobs would come at the cost of losses elsewhere in the economy, we did note that one Department of Transportation computer model did predict that for every $1 billion in highway spending, 47,576 jobs would be created for one year.

Yesterday DoT released an update on their earlier report that revised the number of jobs impacted by infrastructure spending down to 34,779 per billion dollars. Also from the report: “The FHWA analysis refers to jobs supported by highway investments, not jobs created… with the exception of short term resurfacing and preservation projects, highway funds spend out slowly, with only 27% of a project, on average, outlaying in the first year.”