The following was originally posted at the Center for Fiscal Accountability
The Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) released its latest jobless numbers today, showing that unemployment in America is now at a staggering 10.2 percent. These new numbers serve as a glaring reminder of the President’s claims in January that the “stimulus” plan was necessary to keep unemployment from rising above 8 percent. And what about those 4 million jobs that were supposed to be “saved or created?” Shouldn’t those have kept the unemployment rate well below where it is now?
Well, yes. If the administrations’ promises of the impact the “stimulus” would have on the economy were at all true, the country would not be experiencing the worst job numbers it has seen in almost three decades. What’s more, the feeble 640,000 jobs the White House is reporting were “saved or created” by the stimulus is still a gross exaggeration. The reporting process is anything but uniform, and errors have led to artificially high numbers. Moreover, COLA raises are counted as jobs “saved” and the various ways a “job” can be calculated allow for one person to be counted a multitude of times as a job “created.”
And it doesn’t end there. Essentially, the jobs “saved or created” by the $787 billion plan rely on nothing more than fuzzy math and a lot of imagination. The new unemployment rate shows that the stimulus did nothing to stem the country’s hemorrhaging of jobs, and as the President attempts to backpedal from this most recent evidence that his economic philosophy is poorly reconciled with reality, we’ll continue to ask – where are the jobs?