Feeling pressure to show results from massive federal spending amid the highest unemployment in 26 years, President Barack Obama defended his stimulus plan Monday, promising to “create or save” 600,000 more jobs in the next 100 days.
The White House later conceded those jobs would include some temporary, summer and part-time jobs, which economists regard as not stimulative to the economy.
The unemployment rate is 9.4 percent — well above what the White House predicted when it sold Congress on the stimulus bill.
“The reason that this wasn’t a $787 billion hundred-day plan economic recovery plan, why it’s a two-year recovery plan, is because we never expected this all to be solved in a hundred days, right?” White House press secretary Robert Gibbs rhetorically asked when pressed on the bad jobs numbers.
The White House had planned a multi front public relations effort Monday to showcase Obama focusing on the economy after nearly a week overseas.
Instead, the administration was on the defensive and struggling to justify its economic modeling and job creation claims — notably that Obama’s stimulus spending has already saved or created 150,000 jobs.
The administration pushed the $787 billion spending program as a way to create jobs, but about 1.6 million jobs have been lost since Congress approved the program.
“The president made the case that immediate stimulus funds were needed to produce jobs and turn the economy, yet as workers continue to lose their jobs, Americans are beginning to wonder what we paid for,” said House Republican Whip Eric Cantor of Virginia.
Asked to account for the administration’s job creation claims, Jared Bernstein, economic adviser to Vice President Joe Biden and a key member of the administration’s stimulus team, said the 150,000 number is an estimate based on a January report he authored with White House economic adviser Christina Romer.
That same report, used by the administration to sell Congress on the stimulus plan, warned that without the federal spending, unemployment could reach 8.5 percent by now, on its way to a high of 8.8 percent in 2010.
The report predicted that with the stimulus spending, unemployment would peak at 7.8 percent this year, before trending downward. Unemployment for May was measured at 9.4 percent.
That means White House predictions about the dire consequences of not passing the stimulus have been exceeded — even with the stimulus spending.
“Our forecast at that time was right in the middle of every other forecast,” Bernstein said. “And in fact, if we had had a forecast that was much worse than that, we would have been an outlier — we also would have been correct, it turned out.”
Obama was among several administration officials struggling to justify the employment numbers.
“This was the fewest number of jobs that we have lost in about eight months, so it was about half of the number lost of just a few months ago,” he said. “And it’s a sign that we’re moving in the right direction.”
