Obama’s Crystal Ball Wrong on Unemployment Once Again
Mike Brownfield /
A little over three years ago, President Barack Obama’s advisers released a chart that purported to predict the future. With the President’s almighty stimulus, they said, unemployment in America would plummet. And the President promised that unemployment would never rise above 8 percent.
Well, they were wrong.
In the chart below, we take a look at where unemployment is today and where the President’s advisers said it would be. As you can see, there’s a significant difference. (article continued below)
In a new report, Heritage’s Rea Hederman, Jr. analyzes the latest jobs numbers for March 2012 and explains why they’re so disappointing:
The labor market made some gains in March, although the 120,000 new jobs were well below expectations of 200,000-plus. The Bureau of Labor Statistics also announced that the unemployment rate ticked down another tenth to 8.2 from 8.3 percent, largely due to rounding. Even this modest improvement in the unemployment rate reflected ill fortune, because it was due entirely to a marked shift of workers leaving the labor force instead of finding new jobs.
On balance, the March report is clearly disappointing and indicates that the labor market recovery is still struggling even years after the recession’s end. This report is cause for concern for those hoping that the economy would tick up and the unemployment rate down quickly over the next 12 months.
Read more of Hederman’s report, Heritage Employment Report: March Report Mixed, on Balance Disappointing.