To date, $204.6 million in contracts have been awarded to recipients in Missouri. The jobs estimate covers $146 million of that total and more jobs are expected to be announced later this month from grants and loans.
Not surprisingly, since most of the contract funds were awarded through funding allocations or selected by federal agencies for specific services, jobs created were not really targeted to states with the highest unemployment rates (see chart after jump).
Missouri ranked 22nd in terms of the number of jobs created from contracts. Since raw jobs created is a relatively bad comparison, in normalized terms, Missouri ranked 22th when total job creation is placed in the context of the current labor force.
So is the cost worth the jobs created or saved? It may be too early to say, but Democrats in Washington have no doubts.
Vice President Joe Biden remained optimistic after the first report of Recovery Act jobs surfaced during a speech at the St. Louis County Police and Fire Training Center.
“Are we home yet? No, no we are not,” Biden said, according to the Post-Dispatch. “But we’ve stopped the bleeding. The patient is gaining consciousness. We are making progress.”
Jared Bernstein, of the White House Council of Economic Advisers, issued a statement saying it is "too soon to draw any global conclusions from this partial and preliminary data" but the early results are positive in meeting preliminary estimates generated by CEA.
Reporting data for the remainder of funds allocated to Missouri under the Recovery Act will be released later this month.
Related Links:
Recovery.gov: Where's the Money Going? - Missouri
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