Morning Bell: President Obama’s Failed Stimulus

Conn Carroll / September 04, 2009

When President Barack Obama sold his $787 billion stimulus package to the American people, he set one metric for success: jobs. Specifically, President Obama promised the American people he would create 4.1 million jobs by the end of 2010. According to the President’s plan, the stimulus should have lowered the nation’s unemployment rate below 8% by this August. That is the objective standard the President set for himself.

And according to objective data released by the Bureau of Labor Statistics this morning, President Obama’s policies, and his stimulus package, have been complete failures. BLS reports that the number of unemployed persons increased by 466,000 in August raising the nation’s unemployment to 9.7% … the highest it has been in 26 years.

Faced with the failure of their signature economic policy, the Obama administration trotted out Vice President Joe Biden to defend the stimulus yesterday in a speech to the Brookings Institute. Biden claimed that the stimulus bill created or saved between 500,000 and 750,000 jobs. This is demonstrably false. Job creation has fallen since the stimulus became law. When Congress passed the stimulus in February the new hire rate had fallen to 3.2%. The most recent data, from June 2009, shows that after the stimulus passed, job creation fell even further to 2.9%. Employers are creating fewer jobs than they did before the stimulus was passed. (more…)