Last week the Department of Labor released an employment report showing that U.S. employers shed 611,000 private sector jobs in the first three months of this year bringing the nation’s unemployment rate to 8.9%. This was bad news for Americans but even worse news for the Obama administration. In January of this year, the White House released a document lobbying Congress to pass President Barack Obama’s $787 billion stimulus package. The document, which had Council of Economic Advisers chair Christina Romer’s and Chief Economic Policy Adviser to Vice President Jared Bernstein’s names on it, included the following chart:
The big problem for the White House is that the actual data are not matching their computer simulations. Here is a chart (courtesy Econ International Blog) matching real world data with Obama administration fantasy:
As you can see, the Obama administration’s projections were way off. This was also true of the Obama administration’s deficit projections, which just three months into his administration are already $89 billion wrong. And let’s not forget how EPA administrator Lisa Jackson cooked the EPA’s books to cheat the United States economy out of $1.22 trillion.
Addressing the glaring gap between reality and their numbers, Romer told CSPAN this weekend: “Accuracy has always been the main thing, not the political back-and-forth.” Americans aren’t stupid. They know when politicians fudge numbers for political gain. As IHS Global Insight chief U.S. financial economist Brian Bethune told McClatchy: “If they keep playing this game, they’re going to have real credibility problems.”
