Today's New York Times explores
why the White House was wildly off in its employment projections
when it was trying to sell the stimulus package. If you remember,
the economic team said that if we passed the stimulus,
unemployment would be around 8 percent now and without it, we'd
be looking at unemployment in the double digits. Well, we passed
the stimulus, and unemployment is 9.4 percent anyway, and the
White House now concedes it will rise above 10 percent. The
Times notes that, "In concrete terms, the difference
between the situation that the Obama advisers predicted and the
one that has come to pass is about 2.5 million jobs."
The White House has offered two main explanations for why their
estimates were way off. One is that only a small amount of the
stimulus money has been deployed thus far. But I find that rather
amusing, because at the time the stimulus was being debated, one
of the very arguments critics were making against the package was
that it was too focused on long-term projects and that most of
the money would not get deployed for years. "I think there's a
lot of slow moving government spending in this program that won't
work," John Boehner
said on "Meet the Press" during the debate.
The other argument the White House has made is that the economy
has deteriorated much more than anybody anticipated. In last
week's press conference, Obama said, "keep in mind the stimulus
package was the first thing we did, and we did it a couple of
weeks after inauguration. At that point nobody understood what
the depths of this recession were going to look like. If you
recall, it was only significantly later that we suddenly get a
report that the economy had tanked."
But this is just another example of Obama rewriting history,
because when he was trying to sell the stimulus, Obama was
talking about the economic situation in dire terms. In a
Washington Post
op-ed published on Feb. 5, in which Obama made the case for
the stimulus, he began, "By now, it's clear to everyone that we
have inherited an economic crisis as deep and dire as any since
the days of the Great Depression." So either he was lying then
about the depths of the crisis to sell the stimulus or he's lying
now to defend it.
However, even if we give Obama the benefit of the doubt and
acknowledge that economic conditions are inherently
unpredictable, why should we then trust the economic projections
the White House is making to sell other items on his domestic
agenda? If his economic team was 2.5 million jobs off -- and
counting -- in projecting unemployment just a few months into the
future, how on earth can we trust their claims about all the
money preventive care, information technology, and other such
measures will save us on health care 10 or 20 years from now?
