As Christina Romer, Obama's economic advisor (she's the chubby one) says, we've already seen most of the impact of the very necessary Stimulus bill. Behold its glory:

The government's first accounting of jobs tied to the $787 billion stimulus program claimed more than 30,000 positions paid for with recovery money. But that figure is overstated by least 5,000 jobs, according to an Associated Press review of a sample of stimulus contracts.

So, that works out to over $31 million per job created. Damn, it's sweet working for the government. Bathing in other people's money. Plus, you get to work with a bunch of really smart people.

Whoever says Stimulus is a boondoggle that never works has got to feel pretty damned silly about now. It clearly works, and we all owe Joe Biden a great debt for overseeing it. About $787 billion in debt, plus interest.

Question, How many of those created jobs are in the US? & How many were outsourced to India?

You're leaving out the matter of all the highway repairs, infrastructure maintenance and upgrades, equipment purchases, research results, and energy savings that we're getting for our money (most of which we were going to pay for eventually, anyway), not to mention the prevention of the complete collapse of the economy. But go ahead and tilt at your obstructionist windmills. Say, I note that Obama recently declared that Kanye is a jackass. I eagerly await your post on how Kanye is actually the greatest living American.

and the piper must always be paid, but may YS is correct and we should give the devil his due: Reporting from Washington - - The U.S. economy expanded at an annual rate of 3.5% in the third quarter, unofficially marking the end of the worst recession since World War II.

The growth reported today by the Commerce Department for the three months that ended Sept. 30 snapped four straight quarters of economic contraction and was driven largely by a rebound in consumer spending supported by the federal stimulus package and improved business spending that included a revival of home building.

The increase in the gross domestic product, the total value of goods and services produced in the country, is the evidence most economists have said is needed to declare victory against the recession.

- Read on, it’s not all that rosy; but it does give one pause to wonder if maybe…just maybe one, or two, or three, or even a couple two things were maybe done right. -

"It will take sustained, robust GDP growth to bring the unemployment rate down substantially," she said (Romer) in a statement issued by the White House. "Such a decline in unemployment is, of course, what we are all working to achieve."

I’d like to think that’s what we are all working for; it’d be a crying shame if some folks wished other folks misery just so as how them shame wishing folks might capitalize politically.

when you predicted the result before the legislation was signed.

Plenty of people said the stimulus ROI in temporary jobs now per dollar of debt forever was a stinker back when Congress first started debating it.

GDP didn't turn up in quarter 3 because of the "stimulus bill". It turned up because of stimulus, sure; the stimulus from the bank bail-out, TARP, and the trillion-plus $ that the Fed pumped into the money supply. None of which were part of the "stimulus bill".

(More home-building, yeah thats what we need, with a glut of foreclosed homes on the market now, lets build more. That's sustainable growth for you. That should help housing values rebound, increasing the supply of something always leads to higher prices, right?)

The advertised purpose of the Stimulus was to deliver a jolt to the economy. "Every months we fail to pass a Stimulus bill, we lose 600 million more jobs" said the numerically-challenged Nancy Pelosi.

The only thing it jolted was the value of the dollar and the future prospects of the country. And not in a good way.

Was the Cash for Clunkers effect. That effect is not just temporary, it's actively harmful to future activity.

The Stimulus was a gargantuan waste of money. We now have a measure of "jobs saved or created": 25,000 at the outside. My sentiments expressed at the time were similar to those of Krauthammer: "it is the worst bill in galactic history."

In exchange for nothing, we're now irretrievably mired in debt. Because Team Obama sure is smart.

There was that "Buy American" provision that guaranteed we'd piss off all our trading partners and cause them to threaten sanctions. And Joe Biden was watching every nickel, so you know it was done by the book.

Cash for clunkers: $24,000 per car.

Considering we paid $31.8 million per job, we got off cheap on the clunker fiasco. Of course, you'd need to add in the value of the perfectly usable cars destroyed for no reason, but you still wouldn't get close to even a million per.

Can't we treat cars like cheese? Just have the government buy all the Fusions that Ford wants to make but can't sell, and put them in a warehouse until they can be distributed to the needy.

Or better yet, eliminate the middleman and have Ford swap the Fusions for cheese from the dairy farmers?

As was perfectly clear in the article you linked, the 25k/30kish jobs under scrutiny are only a small subset from certain economic sectors, based on a trial run test of accounting for them, precisely to find and correct errors of the kind noted.

With inexcusable distortion/misrepresentation, you keep stating/implying they represent the sum total of jobs attributable to ARRA, which is patent nonsense, as verified by your own linked source.

Under the presumption (based on your history) that the answer to my subject line query is the latter: you really disgust me some(ok, most of the)times.

Sez 30,000. And it's not a "small subset". Let's say it's 100,000 when all is said and done. That's only $10 million per job. Nice work, Brownie.

I'm willing to cut them a special deal. Pay me $5 million up front, and I'll churn out daily positive posts on Obama in perpetuity. It's a bargain, really.

I'd also like them to change the acronym to ARRH, just because it'd be cool to hear Biden say ARRH a lot.