2.5 Million New Jobs in 2 Years is a Lot

I hope people are paying attention. Obama's saying he's going to dump a whole bunch of money into creating blue-collar jobs that will (a) help get us out of the recession and (b) improve conditions for economic growth down the road and people's quality of life.

That's ambitious.

Update: Robert Reich estimates spending of $600-700 billion to achieve this goal. I assume he means this figure will be the total over two years, rather than annually. During the campaign, Obama proposed a National Infrastructure Reinvestment Bank that sounded like it was meant to do much of what he proposes now. Total planned spending for that initiative was $60 billion over ten years, which candidate Obama said would "multiply into almost half a trillion dollars of infrastructure spending and generate nearly two million new jobs—many of them in the construction industry that’s been hit hard by the housing crisis.” If Reich's estimate is correct, we now are considering a program with at least fifty times the annual cost aimed at producing 2.5 million jobs.

I asked Reich in his comments to show how he came up with that estimate, but I don't know if he will respond.

Update 11/22/08:

[C]ongressional aides who have been involved in developing stimulus proposals said that any plan to create 2.5 million jobs is likely to be significantly larger -- probably well over $200 billion, or between 1 and 2 percent of the gross domestic product.