Archive for May 27th, 2009
Poor Jobs Reports Put Obama Stimulus Goal in Jeopardy — Politics Daily:
n campaigning for his $787 billion economic stimulus plan, President Barack Obama often repeated the claim that the plan would “create or save” 3.5 million jobs over its two-year life. But even if Obama’s artful hedge of counting a job “saved” as a job “created” is accepted, recent job losses have made the likelihood that the stimulus plan will deliver the president’s promised number of jobs remote at best. In fact, the stimulus plan will have a hard time meeting the much more modest goal of 2.5 million jobs set for the legislation by Democratic economists in testimony before Congress.
On January 20th, when President Obama took office, the total workforce in the United States numbered approximately 135 million. To reach his goal of 3.5 million jobs, then, President Obama would need to see the number of working Americans rise to about 138.5 million by the end of next year. But since January, nearly 2 million jobs have been lost, meaning that the stimulus bill would have to result in a net gain of just under 6 million jobs to fulfill the president’s promise. Furthermore, White House economists said that passage of the stimulus plan would hold the unemployment rate to around seven percent. Yet the current 8.9 percent jobless rate exceeds even the Administration’s worst estimate of what unemployment would be if the stimulus was not passed.
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