This Wall Street Journal commentary by the founder and CEO of Cypress Semiconductor, T. J. Rodgers, uses real-world data and experience to illustrate the folly and inefficiency of using government intervention and subsidy to create jobs. This comparison is eye-popping.
According to recent Congressional Budget Office statistics on the Obama administration’s 2009 stimulus program, each job created has cost between $500,000 and $4 million. Thus, my $1.2 million, taxed and respent on a government project of uncertain duration, would have created about one job, possibly two, and not the 65 sustainable jobs that my private investment did.
On the other end of the capital-intensity scale, Cypress Semiconductor required huge investments to create jobs in its chip-manufacturing plants. Between 1983 and 2003, those investments totaled $797 million and led to the creation of 4,033 jobs at an investment of $198,000 per job created. Thus, my own experience on the cost of job creation ranges from $18,000 to $198,000 per job, compared with $500,000 to $4 million per job created by the Obama stimulus program.
Unleash the private sector and job creation will flourish. Unfortunately, the current administration holds the opposite view. And we all are paying the price for that serious policy mistake.
Here in North Carolina, however, legislators and the governor are working to reform the failed economic decisions of the past and give North Carolinians a path to stability and prosperity.
