Biden's American Jobs Plan could cost taxpayers about $666,000 per job created

President Joe Biden's proposed $2 trillion American Jobs Plan could end up costing taxpayers more than $666,000 per job created.

The Washington Post gave Biden "two Pinocchios" for saying the American Jobs Plan, his infrastructure and jobs proposal, will create 19 million jobs. Both Biden and his Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg have made the 19 million jobs claim. The source of the statement is a Moody's analysis, which CNN pointed out had estimated the U.S. economy would add about "16.3 million jobs over the same period if the infrastructure proposal does not get passed."

Subtracting Moody's 16.3 million figure from Biden's 19 million projection would equal 2.7 million net jobs created by the $2 trillion infrastructure plan. Rounding up to 3 million jobs created equals $666,666 per job. If the jobs plan leads to 2.7 million jobs created, the cost to taxpayers would be $740,740.

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi has said that House Democrats hope to draft the formal legislation for the American Jobs Plan by May and finalize it by July 4. The White House fact sheet about the plan includes a description of key parts of the proposal but does not list the specific infrastructure projects the bill would fund. 

Democrats are considering using budget reconciliation to move the bill through Congress to avoid the filibuster in the Senate. Democrats used that strategy for the $1.9 trillion American Rescue Plan that Biden signed last month.

"We have this bill that we hope we can do, especially, the infrastructure bill," Pelosi said on Thursday. "It has always been bipartisan. We will do so in a bipartisan way. If we have to go to reconciliation, that is a lever, but I hope it is not something we need to do." 

Biden oversaw the implementation of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act in 2009. The Obama administration estimated that the bill would "create or save" 3.5 million jobs by the end of 2009. Politifact rated former President Obama's claim in May 2009 that the bill "saved or created" 150,000 jobs as "mostly false."

At the time, Republicans as well as some political and economic analysts argued that it was difficult to measure how many jobs a piece of legislation could "save." In the end, the Congressional Budget Office estimated in November 2010 that the number of saved or created jobs fell somewhere between 1.4 million and 3.6 million.