The August Jobs Report: Mission Not Accomplished
Rea Hederman /
In his speech at the Brookings Institution yesterday, Vice-President Joseph Biden claimed credit for saving between five hundred thousand to one million jobs. There is no way to measure the number of jobs saved by the stimulus bill. A better way to judge these figures is by the Administration’s own predictions of what the stimulus bill would to do to job growth and the unemployment rate. This chart shows the Administration’s projections for unemployment if Congress passed the stimulus, and the actual unemployment rate since then.
The unemployment rate is already one-fifth higher than the Administration predicted. It is now expected that the peak of unemployment rate will be one-fourth higher than their predictions. Even worse, the promised job creation that was expected to lower the unemployment rate in the upcoming months has not materialized.
According to Bureau of Labor Statistics data, jobs continued to disappear in August with the unemployment rate increasing to 9.7 percent, the highest level since the summer of 1983. The unemployment (more…)