If you’re the glass-half-full type, you might think it’s good news that the nation’s unemployment rate was largely unchanged from May to June. It crept up just 0.1 percentage points to 9.5 percent. But that also means that the original projections from President Obama’s economic advisers on what would happen with and without the stimulus plan are still off — and significantly so.
In mid-June, we wrote about the large discrepancy between the jobs that actually have been lost and what administration economists had predicted in January. With the July 2 release of the June numbers from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, we offer an updated chart showing the real, monthly unemployment figures plotted in red dots on the Obama advisers’ own chart depicting their projections. This chart was created by “Geoff” at the Web site Innocent Bystanders, and we’ve checked it for accuracy.
See our full article “Making Sense of Stimulus Spending” for more on this topic.