In “Stimulus price tag once again lurches higher,” Stephen Dinan reports in the Washington Times that according to the Congressional Budget Office, the cost of Obama’s “economic stimulus” package (American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 or ARRA) has now risen by another $40 billion.

Congress’s chief scorekeeper said Wednesday that the price tag on President Obama’s stimulus law has risen once again, this time to $830 billion — or more than $40 billion more than first projected.

More than two years after it passed, meanwhile, the Recovery Act’s effect on jobs continues to wane, according to the Congressional Budget Office, which said the massive spending program accounted for between 1.2 million and 3.3 million jobs in the period from January to March of this year.

That improved the unemployment rate by between 0.6 percent and 1.6 percent, compared to where it would have been without the federal spending.

In a new report analyzing the stimulus, CBO analysts said about 70 percent of the package’s spending was paid out by Sept. 30 of last year, meeting the president’s revised goal. . . .

In my recent posting at the Independent Institute’s blog The Beacon, “Obama ‘Stimulus’ Protected 450,000 Government Jobs, Destroyed One Million Private Jobs,” I further reported that a major new study shows that ARRA has been a massive failure by destroying private sector jobs, while subsidizing the continuation of government employees and unions.