Obama Predicted 5.2% Unemployment By December 2012
We got an abysmal jobs report today, but in the context of promises made by the Obama administration, it’s all the more grim. Via Jim Pethokoukis, this chart created by the Obama administration for their sales pitch for the stimulus spending spree shows what they expected the unemployment rate to be both with and without the spending spree, updated with the actual unemployment rate.
Not only is the current unemployment rate roughly 50% higher than what Obama projected it would be, it’s far higher than what Obama projected it would be without the stimulus.
More from Pethokoukis:
14.4%: The U-6 unemployment rate, which includes a) part-timers who want full-time work and b) the discouraged who want a job but haven’t searched for work in the prior month because they believe no jobs are available. Same as November.
10.7%: The U-3 unemployment rate if the labor force participation rate were back to its January 2009 level, when President Obama took office.
10.4%: The U-3 unemployment rate if the labor force participation rate were at the 2012 level predicted by the Congressional Budget Office before the Great Recession. This assumes that as the US ages, the LFP will continue to decline.
And then there’s this, which is the employment to population ratio (the number of people over 16 with non-military jobs in the context of the total number of Americans available for employment):
This economy isn’t improving, and the tax hikes Obama and Democrats just hammered through Congress are going to make things worse.
