8.2 percent unemployment yet another reminder: Obama, Reid stimulus was an epic failure
I've said it before, and I'll keep saying it, because the epic failure of the stimulus is the perfect case study of why government should quit interfering in the economy.
With news today that the unemployment rate remains at 8.2 percent, here's the one chart that says it all. From AEI:
(Click to enlarge)
The dark blue line is what President Obama promised the unemployment rate would be if we passed the stimulus. The light blue line is what he projected unemployment to be without the stimulus. And the red dots are what actually happened.
The Labor Department said the U.S. economy created just 80,000 jobs in June, less than the 90,000 economists had been forecasting. And private-sector job growth was just 84,000, down sharply from 105,000 in May. Not doing fine.And to think, this "only" cost us and our children $787 billion plus interest.
The unemployment rate stayed at a lofty 8.2%.
As a research note from RDQ economics put it: "The good news is that employment growth is not slowing further but there is no sign of it picking up either. At this pace, job creation is not fast enough to lower the unemployment rate with the labor force growing at close to 150,000 per month on average." Shorter: Stagnation Nation
This continues to be the longest streak - 41 months - of unemployment of 8% or higher since the Great Depression. And recall that back in 2009, Team Obama predicted that if Congress passed its $800 billion stimulus plan, the unemployment rate would be around 5.6% today. ...
But those top-line numbers actually overstate the health of the labor market.
- If the size of the U.S. labor force as a share of the total population was the same as it was when Barack Obama took office - 65.7% then vs. 63.8% today - the U-3 unemployment rate would be 10.9%. Even if you take into account that the LFP should be declining as America ages, the unemployment rate would be 10.5%. (Emphasis original.)
As for me, I'll take freedom - and the economic prosperity for all that's produced by entrepreneurs, not bureaucrats.
Who's with me?
