Back in January 2009, right after the inauguration, I posted a quick summary of views from economists about the expected effect of the stimulus. The stimulus was expected to be about 20% bigger than it ended up, but the basic gist was that doing nothing would mean high unemployment rates (9%) through 2010, and beginning to drop in 2011, finally returning to historical norms by 2014. Enacting the stimulus as it was planned was expected to lead to unemployment rates peaking at 8% in mid-2009, and dropping steadily through 2013. The recovery plan was supposed to lessen the worst and shorten the duration of the employment loss.
In January of 2010, I posted the followup, which was cautiously optimistic, while pointing out that unemployment was actually at 10%, but did appear to be declining slightly. Sadly, this trend was not borne out by the end of 2010. Here we are, over two years after the Bush administration began the economic recovery plan, nearly two years since the Obama administration compromised its way to a smaller stimulus devoted largely to shoring up banks with no guarantees of lending to actual citizens, and it seems the results are actually worse than what was expected from doing nothing at all. That’s just sad.
Here’s the latest unemployment figures from the Bureau of Labor Statistics. I sincerely hope you’re not one of the 10%. Happy New Year.
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The government has always gotten out of a recession or depression by putting massive people to work on government projects – many of which are military. This time they have done that to some extant but this GOP forced bank assistance plan definitely has not worked. Maybe bank regulation would but we can’t count on that now.
[…] Nuclear power aids White House climate push http://www.alertnet.org http://www.msnbc.msn.com Ahmadinejad says Iran to install advanced centrifuges presstv.com Israel not planning war against Iran: Netanyahu presstv.com Stimulus spending: billion per month money.cnn.com Feds: Toyota must turn over recall documents http://www.msnbc.msn.com Brown v. Obama http://www.politico.com Video Rating: 4 / 5 Additionally you can look at this related post: http://andysocial.com/archives/2010/12/27/stimulus-disappointment […]
http://catallaxyfiles.com/files/2010/12/Stimulus-vs-unemployment-November2010-dots-Small1.gif
Worse than nothing. That’s utterly depressing. Thanks, Munsey.