I wrote a post a couple of months ago which talked about the falsity of the “Obama’s plan will create 4 million jobs” claim. In that post I used the projections of Obama’s own economic team to make my point.
Today I decided to revisit those projections, taken from their January 10 report, and see how we’re doing. Obviously it’s still very early, but it’s possible even at this stage to ask:
- Is anything good happening?, and
- How competent are these economists at projecting even 3 months into the future?
So here’s the answer:
All I did was take the Obama team’s graph right out of their report, and add the maroon triangle to represent the unemployment as of the end of March (8.5% – though I’ll admit that it’s not clear to me where the quarters start and stop). And what do we see?
- Obama’s plan was supposed to keep unemployment from exceeding 8%. Fail.
- Obama’s plan was supposed to keep unemployment from matching the rate without the plan. Fail.
- Obama’s team provided us with a 5-year projection, but they’re completely off track after only 1 quarter. Epic Fail.
As you can see, we’re already 2/3 of the way to what was supposed to be the worst case: 9% unemployment.
It’s almost like the criticisms that the plan didn’t focus on near-term jobs creation were well-founded.
April 18, 2009 at 6:51 pm
Yay! Graphs and charts!
I think we are generally in agreement as to the efficacy of government solutions to non-governmental problems…
April 19, 2009 at 6:03 pm
Sadly, we don’t even know that we are 2/3 of the way there yet. Well, socialism as our recovery plan will either help it or make it a whole lot worse, right?
“The problem with socialism is that you eventually run out of other people’s money.”– Margaret Thatcher