Christina Romer, chair of the White House Council of Economic Advisers, talked jobs with NBC "Meet the Press" host David Gregory on Sunday. The interview came a few days after the release of encouraging numbers — employment rose by 162,000 in March, the biggest one-month increase in three years. A few of Romer’s optimistic comments, though, could use some context.
Even though the number of Americans with jobs went up, the unemployment rate — 9.7 percent —
Issues: economy
Ad Serves Up a Dose of Exaggeration
The Washington Post reported on March 9 that Employers for a Healthy Economy, a coalition of business groups that includes the National Association of Manufacturers and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, plans to spend up to $10 million running an ad about the effects of health care legislation on the economy.
The ad, which portrays workers and businesses going through difficult times, says that "health care costs will go even higher" and that this will "[make] a tough economy even worse." These claims need context.
Obama’s State of the Union Address
President Obama peppered his State of the Union address to Congress and the nation with facts, which were mostly right but sometimes cherry-picked, strained or otherwise misleading. He said “there are about 2 million Americans working right now” because of last year’s stimulus bill. But his own economic advisers say …
Obama’s Economic Speech
We’re always alert for signs that the president (any president) is overselling his programs. Here’s what we heard in President Obama’s speech on Tuesday announcing new efforts to create jobs: He highlighted a Congressional Budget Office estimate that “up to” 1.6 million jobs …
Health Care and the Economy
Would the House-passed health care bill make a tough economy worse and wipe out more jobs, as claimed in a TV ad from the U.S. Chamber of Commerce? Or would it help small business and encourage economic growth, as claimed in an ad sponsored by a big labor union …
Michelle’s European Vacation
Q: Did Michelle Obama and her daughters use taxpayer money to take a European vacation?
A: The first lady, her mother and her children did stay in Europe for a private vacation after the president completed an overseas trip on official business. However, no taxpayer money was used for the first family’s personal expenses.
Virginia Unemployment Clarification
In our article "Virginia Myths and More," we wrote that some of the federal stimulus money available to Virginia came with a requirement to change the state’s unemployment eligibility rules to give "benefits to part-time workers for the first time." However, an alert reader who works at the Virginia Employment Commission told us that the state has always extended unemployment benefits to part-time workers. We checked in with the VEC, and our article could use some clarification.
More Unemployment Blues
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.
Blame It on the Governor
Two new Republican ads targeting New Jersey Gov. Jon Corzine contain a few misleading claims. One ad suggests that Corzine is responsible for New Jersey’s business climate being “among the worst in the nation.” But the survey cited as the source of the claim shows that the perception of …
Making Sense of Stimulus Spending
With the economy continuing to shed hundreds of thousands of jobs per month, Republicans are stepping up attacks on President Obama. They claim that the massive “stimulus” spending isn’t working very well. A Republican Party Web site classifies as “fiction” the president’s repeated claim that the spending already has “saved …