Brookings Speech Opener
Barack Obama might have chosen a better opener for his speech today: Almost exactly one year ago, on a cold winter’s day, I met with my new economic team at the headquarters of my presidential transition offices in Chicago. Over the course of four hours, my advisors presented an analysis of where the economy stood, accompanied by a chilling set of charts and graphs, predicting where we might end up. It was an unforgettable series of presentations. Was this one of those charts? Obama's economic team predicted in January that without the stimulus plan, unemployment would rise to 9 percent. It rose to 10.2 percent before leveling off last month. Yet, in his speech today, Obama said that thanks to the stimulus, we've avoided those terrible scenarios his economic team predicted in that series of "unforgettable" presentations. If that's what he thinks, those presentations must have been quite forgettable. The jobs picture is currently worse than his team predicted it would be.
3 comments:
Obama: "Blue is Red. Red is Green. I'm the best president I've ever seen."
B.O. has no idea about how an economy really works. As a result, everything he does only serves to make things worse.
Dear GOD, can we please just skip the time period between now and the next couple of elections?
The official unemployment statistics conceal the fact that the total unemployed is still increasing. The official stats are based on number of people collecting unemployment compensation. Typically those benefits run out in 12 months, so after 12 mos, the unemployed disappear, statistically speaking.
Actual employment is not just the flipside of the official unemployment rates. An estimate is the employment rate, which was 71% for the US in 2004 (Source http://www.oecd.org/dataoecd/41/15/32504422.pdf for example). The baseline unemployment rate then was about 6%, just to give you an idea.
Employment figures are tinkered with extensively. See http://www.bls.gov/news.release/empsit.t01.htm, "Not in labor force" line, (truly unemployed), in thousands. This politically damning figure is up for November 2009.
Doubtless the creepy Mr 0 knows the meaning of this, and will lie about it.
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