$2 Million stimulus dollars per job.

Via Len Penzo we learn of a Michigan factory that's received $300mm in subsidies and added 150 jobs. That's $2mm per job. A news release implies, but does not state, that this money is also paying for a second a plant, which will add another 300 jobs. It states that the first plant will fully employ 320, and makes further comments on increased staffing.

For the sake of argument, let's pretend that the multiplier doesn't exist and ignore other side effects (i.e. American competitiveness in high tech sectors). Mr. Penzo is correct that $2,000,000 per job is probably not the most efficient use of the Government's finite resources. What if the final result is $300mm for 620 permanent jobs (ignoring temporary work like construction and surveying).  Now we are down to well under $500,000 per job, and it is much more ambiguous. If each job lasts 10 years and pays workers (with bens) an average of $80,000 a year, we are at $5mm in salaries. This looks like a good deal depending on your discount rate.

Now, I don't know if this piece of stimulus was a good deal or not. My assumptions are probably wide off the mark and we don't know if the extra 320 jobs would appear nor if they would have without the stimulus money. The general point is that when attacking spending per job created, it would be nice to have an idea of what the baseline for a good project is.

S&P, 5 days later

Well, what have we seen? Previously I speculated that bond rates wouldn't move. I have to admit to missing on this one. With the stock market tanking we've seen yield on the 30 year fall by an additional 28 bps, and it would seem that S&P's downgrade is meaningless. However, if we believe reports, they do seem to have some sway on France.

Everytime Obama speaks the market tanks

The title of this post refers to an oft repeated line among certain wall street types. I don't have readily available data to prove or disprove it, but I would bet quite a bit that it is false.  Reason 1: What new information can the President possibly be introducing each and every time that it pushes the market down? Furthermore, who are the traders that are sophisticated enough to determine the impact of his statements, but unable to see that he's not actually able to accomplish anything due to gridlock?
Reason 2: Let's say that the market goes down because he is actually able to unsettle it, or even because he unhappily reminds too many traders that he exists. If this phenomenon is true and so well known (go on, google it), why hasn't it been competed out?

A bad move for S&P?

So S&P's reputation been somewhat injured by the whole subprime thing--just a bit. Warren Buffet doesn't use ratings agencies in investment decisions (despite owning one), and I've heard at least one very well known mutual fund manger publicly speak very disparagingly of their work.

S&P threatening to downgrade the debt is virtually the same as a downgrade--the federal government's ability to pay its bills doesn't change because of S&P says it has, and the public threat clued us all in into their thinking. S&P has made good on their very public threat to downgrade the US credit rating. Well, in the week since the debt deal, which didn't meet S&P's very public demands, we've seen yields the 30 year's yield fall by 40bps.  Chances are that we won't see much of a move post ratings downgrade. If S&P's most public credit rating is entirely ignored, is their whole business in danger of sliding into irrelevancy?

Not right away, not while companies are contractually obligated to please the ratings agencies, but it's very tough to see how S&P comes out ahead on this one.

Payroll taxes (V1)

Krugman comments on the politics around the payroll tax, and reminds us that "Milton Friedman’s permanent income hypothesis tells us that much of such cuts will be saved, not spent." This makes the case for spending based stimulus much stronger. The long term unemployed are having significant trouble finding work. After some threshold they can reasonably assume their future employment income to be zero. However, once they are back in the work force, they have reentered the ranks of the employed and can reasonably expect continuous work until their retirement. The result is that their lifetime income has increased dramatically and they can be expected to spend a large portion of their wages. There is a little model below the fold.

Reasonably conservative Obama

David Frum somewhat defends Obama's record. This section struck me as particularly surprising:

Obama’s only tax increases – those contained in the Affordable Care Act – do not go into effect until 2014. Personal income tax rates and corporate tax rates are no higher today than they have been for the past decade. The payroll tax has actually been cut by 2 points. Total federal tax collections have dropped by 4 points of GDP since 2007, from 18+% to 14+%, the lowest rate since the Truman administration

Assuming this is true, it seems fairly odd. Did the stimulus cut taxes by 4% of GDP? Well, no, the US GDP in 2010 was $14.66 trillion, and the total stimulus tax cut was $288 million. This is about 1.9% of GDP, but that outlay was over the entire length of the stimulus to date so we can safely assume it was lower. It can't be the cut in the payroll tax, because that happened too late for it to impact 2010. Perhaps it was a running decline from 2007 to 2010?

Well, I found tax numbers here and GDP numbers here (which reports GDP lower than the CIA number above). This shows GDP falling from 17.7% in 08 to 14.8% in 2010. Of the 2.9% reduction, about 0.8% is a fall in corporate tax collection. This leaves us with a real puzzle, because we know, or think we know, that the recession has had a disproportionate impact on those at lower economics rungs, and the WSJ editorial page loves to tell us that the rich pay all the income taxes.

I don't have a solution to this puzzle yet.

Ineffective policy recommendations.

I heard an important story on Market Place today. The story highlighted the long lasting negative impact that a slow start to one's career can have. Recent grads--and by recent we mean 2008 onwards--are having trouble entering the workforce, and hence we've handicapped a generation. Ok, this story is pretty well known, but it's good to hear it publicized.

What blew me away was the solution: "We could, for example, exempt workers under 25 from paying their share of the Social Security payroll tax."

Something tells me that he doesn't fully understand incentives. When unemployment for a group is nearly double the national average, you can safely infer that the problem is not a lazy workforce. Cutting taxes on workers might increase the supply of workers, but it will do nothing to increase demand for them. Oh, and to get back to intertemporal smoothing, a member of the workforce may reasonably see the recent behavior by the government as a willingness to reneg on social security, and may further interpret specific cuts in their payroll tax as a chance to exclude them from future benefits. This reduces their incentive to rack up working years (even at a low wage), and may actually have the exact opposite impact of what he intends.

Cutting the employer portion of the payroll tax may be a different story, but the reality is that the marginal cost of a recent grad is already pretty low. Making additional employees profitable would do a lot more.