Governor Doyle is out there today trumpeting the 8,284 jobs created or saved in State of Wisconsin due to the Federal Stimulus. I’m not exactly sure about how you measure ‘saved’ jobs but I’m sure there is some solid fuzzy math behind that number. Of course nearly all of those are in the public sector and paid for by dumping a larger deficit on future generations yet to be born – talk about passing the buck!

On the hand, consider the 31,000 manufacturing jobs and 413 manufacturers the State of Wisconsin lost in the last year. This was reported just two months ago. By my math that would mean we’ve lost at least a net of 22,716 jobs and 412 employers (kept big, massive state government here, at least we dodged that bullet!). Of course this the way it always is – report the jobs we think we saved or hope we might created and ignore the other side of the balance sheet. This is no different than every time they talk about creating all those ‘green jobs’ to save our economy. Just never mind those ‘other jobs’ we lose in the process.

So is there a way to figure out the real cost of those 8,284 jobs created or saved? The easy math would say we just spent $680 million on those jobs which comes out to be about $82,000 per job. I’m guessing not every job we saved has an $82,000/year salary attached though. I wonder where the rest of it went then? Just a bit of overhead for the privilege of saving all those jobs I guess. What happens next year though? Are we hoping for another $680 million to fall from the Federal government? We haven’t even balanced our own state budget this year so it’s not like we’ve got money lying around to pick up the slack either. The only way we’re going to really rescue our jobs and save our state economy is if we get serious about cutting taxes and taking other steps to encourage sustainable, private industry. Till then we’re just buying time and time isn’t cheap.