A Forecast With Hope Built In

NY Times ^ | June 30, 2009 | DAVID LEONHARDT

[frogjerk]

In the weeks just before President Obama took office, his economic advisers made a mistake. They got a little carried away with hope. To make the case for a big stimulus package, they released their economic forecast for the next few years. Without the stimulus, they saw the unemployment rate — then 7.2 percent — rising above 8 percent in 2009 and peaking at 9 percent next year. With the stimulus, the advisers said, unemployment would probably peak at 8 percent late this year. We now know that this forecast was terribly optimistic. The jobless rate has already reached 9.4 percent. On Thursday, the Labor Department will announce the latest number, for June, and forecasters are expecting it to rise further. In concrete terms, the difference between the situation that the Obama advisers predicted and the one that has come to pass is about 2.5 million jobs. It’s as if every worker in the city of Los Angeles received an unexpected layoff notice. There are two possible explanations that the administration was so wrong. And sorting through them matters a great deal, because they point in opposite policy directions. The first explanation is that the economy has deteriorated because the stimulus package failed. Some critics say that stimulus just doesn’t work, while others argue that this particular package was too small or too badly constructed to make a difference.

[frogjerk]

SPIN SPIN SPIN!

[frogjerk]

There is no ironclad way to judge the stimulus, because we can’t rerun the last six months in an alternate universe. But you can get a pretty good sense by looking at the size of the gap between where the economy is today and where the administration thought it would be: those 2.5 million jobs that would still exist if the forecast had been right.

WRONG!

This is what the administration predicted if they passed the stimulus and they we so wrong!

[outlawjake]

others argue that this particular package was too small

who the hell argues that the stimulus was too small... paul krudman???

[Berlin_Freeper]

Those dots look like they are just getting started.

[Snow Eagle]

I think you need a bigger chart!

[bill1952]

>The jobless rate has already reached 9.4 percent...

LOL! In lala land. - it’s much higher than that.

[Costumed Vigilante]

In the weeks just before President Obama took office, his economic advisers made a mistake.

Oh BS. They just flat out lied, and will continue to do so. They knew damn well this "stimulus" fraud was going to cripple capitalist America and enslave its populace. There was no mistake, no miscalculation, no scope estimation error.

Quit being so naive. Or pretending to be.

It was designed to do exactly what it did: Deplete America.

A verbis ad verbera

[3niner]

Actually, the “stimulus” is counter productive and made the situation worse.