October unemployment numbers came out, and it ain't pretty. Once again, the Innocent Bystanders guys did their graph showing where the Obama Administration said things would be with and without the stimulus. To refresh your memory, the IB folks plot where the actual numbers came in month-to-month:
A Side Note on the Administration’s Defense of the Stimulus. The President and his economic team have claimed that the plan is working as intended, that they’re on track to save the original goal of 3.6 million jobs, but somehow, despite practically drowning in success, we’re going to have to live with high unemployment for years to come. Oh, and that everything is still Bush’s fault.
These claims have been debunked by a variety of sources, including the AP (and here), the Chicago Tribune, the Denver Post, USA Today, the Wall Street Journal, and blogs such as Political Math (H/T d3ft punk).
But forget the quantitative treatment for a moment and consider what the Obama team’s graph said on a qualitative level. The graph says that within a couple of quarters, the stimulus package will stop the increase in unemployment and reverse the employment trend. That was the real mission of the stimulus. Stop job loss. Get the private sector hiring again.
So no matter how convoluted and fanciful the “jobs created or saved” numbers get, we just have to remember what the point used to be, and realize how far short we’ve fallen. And whose fault that really is.
Of course the Obama Administration will never admit that their $787 billion boondoggle didn't work, so it will be up the the Republican Party and the American People to boot enough of them out of office in 2010 and 2012 before the real money begins getting spent.
Stop the bleeding now.
