Obama’s Growing Credibility Gap

Conn Carroll /

Last week the Department of Labor released an employment report showing that U.S. employers shed 611,000 private sector jobs in the first three months of this year bringing the nation’s unemployment rate to 8.9%. This was bad news for Americans but even worse news for the Obama administration. In January of this year, the White House released a document lobbying Congress to pass President Barack Obama’s $787 billion stimulus package. The document, which had Council of Economic Advisers chair Christina Romer’s and Chief Economic Policy Adviser to Vice President Jared Bernstein’s names on it, included the following chart:

unemploymentrate

The big problem for the White House is that the actual data are not matching their computer simulations. Here is a chart (courtesy Econ International Blog) matching real world data with Obama administration fantasy: (more…)