Having heard a lot of hot air from our very own Huhne about the vast numbers of new jobs that will be created by taxing the buggery out of energy consumers to fund a green employment utopia, I hope the end result will be somewhat better than the US experience where each new job has cost the best part of $5 million.

From The Washington Post :

A $38.6 billion loan guarantee program that the Obama administration promised would create or save 65,000 jobs has created just a few thousand jobs two years after it began, government records show.

The program — designed to jump-start the nation’s clean technology industry by giving energy companies access to low-cost, government-backed loans — has directly created 3,545 new, permanent jobs after giving out almost half the allocated amount, according to Energy Department tallies.

Hotair.com has crunched those numbers to get the cost per new job and it’s not a pretty sight :

That may be the understatement of the year.  Even with Obama’s initial promise of 65,000 jobs created (or “saved,” which makes zero sense in this context), that would still come to $593,846 per job, which is hardly an efficient use of capital.  If a private-sector business had that kind of capital, it could easily create five jobs from that amount with $100,000 in compensation each, with enough left over for a substantial profit margin.

But the actual results in this case are much worse.  With $17.2 billion spent on these programs, the cost per actual job created comes to $4.853 million.  That kind of capital could launch entire new businesses, let alone multiple jobs.  Any company that ate through $4.853 million to create a job would shortly become a former company … kind of like Solyndra, where $535 million disappeared and took 1,000 jobs along with it.

I wonder if similar figures will ever get published here.