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.
