Council of Economic Advisers’ study predicted that only 10 percent of the total job impact of the Recovery Act would take place during calendar year 2009. Given lags in spending and hiring, the peak impact of the stimulus on jobs was expected not to be achieved until the end of 2010.”

In other words, an ever growing number of Americans have to sit on the unemployment line until next year by government design. Why? So in 2010, Barack Obama and the Democrats can run on falling unemployment numbers. They’d rather you starve now so they can have recovery happen in an election year.
We’re all political pawns to Barack Obama.

imagine how bad it would be if people like me and barry had not saved or created all these other jobs!

January 18, 2009, Obama’s top economics advisor Larry Summers said Barack Obama’s stimulus plan would keep unemployment below 10% and could be deemed to have failed if it crossed 10%.

One other note; the curve of actual data shows an inflection point at the time the spend-u-more plan went into effect. Unemployment curves UP right after the bill was passed.

Implication; the cause of the 2-3% excess unemployment that we’ve got right now is……the Obama/Reid/Pelosi spend-u-more plan.

I don’t know if all the spending planned for next year is going to bring the number down much if any. Gene is right about the shortened work weeks.

One would figure that the very poor fit of models to reality–even if you allow them a bit of a fudge factor for the month’s data that they didn’t have yet–would eventually temper the enthusiasm of the central planners, but evidently not.

And regarding that fudge factor; ahem, if they can’t predict a month out, then maybe, just maybe, we ought to take that fact into account when they tell us what it’s going to be like in a year or so.