According to Martha K. Asbury, Director, Administrative Services, Florida Department of Education:

"For the quarter that ended September 30, 2009, the Department of Education reported that a total of 19,553.25 jobs were saved or created with [American Recovery and Reinvestment Act] ARRA funds. Please note that these numbers are expected to increase in subsequent quarters and that they are calculated on a full-time equivalence (FTE) basis, meaning for example, that if there are two half-time positions, they will be reported as one job for federal reporting purposes. You may also want to note that the total of the awards to the Florida Department of Education is $3,183,156,730..."

Using my trusty calculator that works out to $162,960.93 per job saved. The Department of Education accounted for 67% of all AARA funded jobs saved in Florida. These are all government jobs, not private sector jobs.

Martha breaks down the education jobs "saved" as follows:

Of the reported jobs, 13,237.70 FTEs were included in the “instructional” category and another 3,081.32 fell into the instructional support category (e.g., pupil personnel, instructional media, instruction and curriculum development, instructional staff training, etc.). The remainder were reported as general support services, plant maintenance and community services.

There is also an “other” category for which 2,436 FTE were reported. The majority of these are instructional personnel in colleges and universities.

Henry Hazlitt, author of "Economics in One Lesson" wrote:

“There is no more persistent and influential faith in the world today than the faith in government spending. Everywhere government spending is presented as a panacea for all our economic ills....An enormous literature is based on this fallacy, and, as so often happens with doctrines of this sort, it has become part of an intricate network of fallacies that mutually support each other....Everything we get, outside of the free gifts of nature, must in some way be paid for. The world is full of so-called economists who in turn are full of schemes for getting something for nothing. They tell us that the government can spend and spend without taxing at all; that it can continue to pile up debt without ever paying it off, because „we owe it to ourselves.‟...such pleasant dreams in the past have always been shattered by national insolvency or a runaway inflation....either immediately or ultimately every dollar of government spending must be raised through a dollar of taxation. Once we look at the matter in this way, the supposed miracles of government spending will appear in another light....With...public works, necessary for their own sake, and defended on that ground alone, I am not here concerned. I am here concerned with public works considered as a means of "providing employment‟ or of adding wealth to the community that it would not have otherwise have had.” (pp. 31-32)

Hazlitt used the example of government using tax dollars and deficit spending to build a bridge (or a road) and explains:

"Therefore, for every public job created by the [government construction of the] bridge project a private job has been destroyed somewhere else....at best there has been a diversion of jobs....More bridge builders; fewer automobile workers, television technicians, clothing workers, farmers....What has happened is merely that one thing has been created instead of others.” (pp. 33-34)

Government does not create or save jobs. Government consumes wealth and redistributes it. As Hazlitt points out, "The government spenders create the very problem of unemployment that they profess to solve....the larger the percentage of the national income taken by taxes the greater the deterrent to private production and employment.”

Today government spending is 28% of our Gross Domestic Product, the highest ever. Enough said. Please take the time to read a synopsis of Henry Hazlitt's book by going here. Read and learn about economics.