Over at the Innocent Bystanders blog there’s a great comparison of how the unemployment rate of 9.4 percent announced today stacks up against the Obama administration’s forecast at the time of the president’s $787 billion stimulus.
Innocent Bystanders uses the administration’s own unemployment projections from the stimulus sales pitch and then plots in red dots the actual numbers.
To sell the plan, the White House said that the unemployment rate would zoom up to 8.5 percent by now without borrowing and printing the money for crisis spending. With the cash dump, the administration forecast that unemployment would have already leveled off and be starting downward from a peak of 7.8 percent.
The numbers are in many ways even worse than they seem because of the diminishing number of people actually looking for work.
The stimulus might have done more to give the economy the sugar high the administration was hoping for if there were not so much long term uncertainty.
Right now, tax hikes, carbon costs, health care, interest rates, debt and inflation are all looming. A business that was situated to expand might wisely wait to see what the new situation was going to be and what else Obamism might bring.
