Writer distorts stimulus money numbers

In his Oct. 2 letter, Glenn Drahn says that Troubled Assets Relief Program stimulus money would have been better spent on tax cuts, because dividing the cost of TARP by the number of jobs created amounts to $400,000 per job. Drahn must be reading conservative blogs.

As Nobel Prize-winning economist Paul Krugman has pointed out, that's a bogus talking point. Why? Because they are taking the cost of a plan that will extend over several years, creating millions of jobs each year, and dividing it by the number of jobs created in just one year.

It as though an opponent of school lunch programs were to take the estimate of the cost of that program over five years and divide it by the number of lunches provided in just the first year, in order to claim the program was hugely wasteful because every lunch cost $14.

Should we all just get a tax cut so we can continue to buy more widescreen TVs made in Korea, and clothes and junk made in China? No. creating American jobs is our country's way back to prosperity. It is investing in our future.

Jay Portas

Cedar Rapids