Obama: National unemployment to reach 10% this year
What? I thought the $787 billion stimulus bill that no one had time to read was supposed to lower unemployment. (The "Recovery Plan" in the chart is the stimulus bill, and all the numbers in blue came from Obama's economic team.)
Silly me.President Barack Obama said the U.S. unemployment rate will reach 10 percent this year, even as the economy begins to emerge from the recession.
Since President Obama's stimulus plan worked so well, what's he going to do for an encore?
"You're starting to see the engines of the economy turn," Obama said today in an interview with Bloomberg Television at the White House. "It's going to take a long time -- we had a huge de-leveraging that took place."
Obama said the jobless rate may keep rising even though the economy may start expanding "shortly" as confidence rebounds. The U.S. unemployment rate hasn't been 10 percent or higher since 1983.
"What you've seen is that the pace of job loss has slowed," the president said. "The economy is going to turn around, but as you know, jobs are a lagging indicator and we've got to produce 150,000 jobs every month just to keep pace, just to flatten this out.""I'm confident that if we take the steps that are necessary on health care, on energy, on education, if we get a strong financial regulatory system in place so that people have confidence in the markets again, that we will end up seeing recovery shortly," Obama said.
Wow. After a success like the stimulus bill, what could go wrong?
