Poor Joe Weisenthal at Business Insider had a hissy fit Friday about the GOP using Obama’s own stimulus related chart
Once again, conservatives are using today’s jobs number as a jumping-off point to slam Obama.
Our pal Jim Pethokoukis at AEI takes the opportunity to remind everyone that the unemployment rate — of 8.3 percent — remains well above where The White House predicted it would be with the stimulus, back in 2009.
Now, just to understand what’s going on here, the light blue line represents what The White House thought the arc of job creation would look like without the stimulus. The Dark Blue Line represents what the White House predicted the jobs trajectory would look like WITH the stimulus.
Said chart was used to say This Is Why We Need To Pass This $850 billion campaign donor kickback bill.
Here’s what you need to realize. The original chart above comes from a document (.pdf) that was put out by White House economic advisors Christina Romer and Jared Bernstein on January 10, 2009.
It’s important to recall that his was right in the throes of the recession. At the time, things were weakening much faster than anyone could possibly realize in real time.
So what Joe’s saying is that the Obama administration was too incompetent, to stuck in academic thought, to divorced from how economies work, to understand just how bad the recession was….hey, didn’t it officially end in June 2009, before the Stimulus truly kicked in? So, that would mean that Obama’s Stimulus made the unemployment situation worse.
James Pethokoukis responds
The point is that with the right response from Washington, the recovery could be much stronger than it is right now — and the unemployment rate much lower.
And the Democrat/Obama response has been exactly wrong the vast majority of the time, hence, high unemployment that has lasted throughout the entire Obama term. But, Liberals always have an excuse.
[…] William Teach of The Pirate’s Cove points to a chart from the American Enterprise Institute that has some liberals just hopping mad. The chart, of course, comes from the President’s own economic team; it’s simply that the current official unemployment rate was added by others. And the AEI story notes several things wrong with the 8.3% official unemployment number, including how many people have dropped out of the workforce, and the Congressional Budget Office’s projection of what the size of the labor force should be this year; if that figure is used, unemployment would actually be 10.4%. […]
Isn’t the government approved unemployment rate 9.1%?
Whereas the real number is like 20%?
If one were to take “working population” as a percentage of the overall population, the actual unemployment is 10.8%. That is an apples to apples comparison.
Not only that, while the Obama administration is touting the great numbers of 225,000 people finding jobs in February, in actuality the US market must create 755,000 jobs in the next seven months to be even when Obama took office.
We know that ain’t gonna happen.
When you add to that the fact that Obama care is going to add to the debt (there is no doubt of that now) and add to the average expenditure of families for health care, this guy has been an unmitigated failure.
The hypocrisy of the Democrats is exposed as when Bush was president, they wailed about an unemployment rate of 5.4%. Now they tout a fluffed 8.4% as historic and wonderful.
I have said that while Obama should be beat on the head with the economy, the fact of the matter is that he and his cronies are controlling the numbers. If Republicans run a one issue campaign with Obama controlling the numbers, they will lose.
Obama must be attacked with a thousand issues and things that he has screwed up and done wrong. One issue won’t alone with him controlling the message won’t defeat him.