Time Is of the Essence

Congress passed the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, better known colloquially as Obama's new stimulus package on February 13, 2009. However, it took Obama until today to sign the Act into law. That's a whole four days. Granted, there was a long weekend in-between, but why couldn't he sign it into law the day of?

If we take January's change in non-farm payrolls as an indicator (-598,000 jobs) and average it over the 31 days of January to get an average number of jobs lost per day, it works out to 77,000 jobs lost over the course of the four days that Obama waited. I am in no way suggesting that Obama's delay cost the economy 77,000 jobs, since I sincerely doubt that the calculus of job losses can be worked out this way (and who would be so cruel as to lay someone off on the Saturday of a long weekend?), but it is an interesting thought to ponder (for me) nonetheless.

Edit (Feb. 21): fixed a double negative.