Unemployment tops 10%. About that Stimulus...

Unemployment tops 10%, 10.2% to be precise. There's a graph and everything (look long and hard at this) from Geoff at Innocent Bystanders, and also this:

A Side Note on the Administration’s Defense of the Stimulus. The President and his economic team have claimed that the plan is working as intended, that they’re on track to save the original goal of 3.6 million jobs, but somehow, despite practically drowning in success, we’re going to have to live with high unemployment for years to come. Oh, and that everything is still Bush’s fault.

These claims have been debunked by a variety of sources, including the AP (and here), the Chicago Tribune, the Denver Post, USA Today, the Wall Street Journal, and blogs such as Political Math (H/T d3ft punk).

But forget the quantitative treatment for a moment and consider what the Obama team’s graph said on a qualitative level. The graph says that within a couple of quarters, the stimulus package will stop the increase in unemployment and reverse the employment trend. That was the real mission of the stimulus. Stop job loss. Get the private sector hiring again.

So no matter how convoluted and fanciful the “jobs created or saved” numbers get, we just have to remember what the point used to be, and realize how far short we’ve fallen. And whose fault that really is.

Erick Erickson at Redstate also has a useful graph for comparison and writes:

Unemployment this morning topped 10.2%, even though the number seeking employment has declined. Many have just given up. Likewise, and more troublesome, the average hours worked in a week is at its lowest in decades — 33 hours. That suggests employers are going to just expand hours worked in the future, instead of hiring new people. So the unemployment number will stay high for a while.On January 18, 2009, Obama's top economics advisor Larry Summers said Barack Obama's stimulus plan would keep unemployment below 10% and could be deemed to have failed if it crossed 10%.

On July 17, 2009, Larry Summers said

"Both administration and independent forecasts predicted that only a very small part of the total job creation expected from the Recovery Act would take place within six months," he continued. "Indeed, a Council of Economic Advisers' study predicted that only 10 percent of the total job impact of the Recovery Act would take place during calendar year 2009. Given lags in spending and hiring, the peak impact of the stimulus on jobs was expected not to be achieved until the end of 2010."

In other words, an ever growing number of Americans have to sit on the unemployment line until next year by government design. Why? So in 2010, Barack Obama and the Democrats can run on falling unemployment numbers. They'd rather you starve now so they can have recovery happen in an election year.

And here's some more about the jobs we supposed didn't lose, the jobs 'created or saved' by the stimulous:

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The report claims the purchase of a $1,000 lawn mower to cut grass at the Fayetteville National Cemetery in Arkansas saved or created 50 jobs.

"Many Head Start programs reported saving the jobs of employees who in fact had simply been given raises with stimulus money."

"A $7,960 contract for a 'Basketball System Replacement' in Ohio claimed three jobs."

A sewer project in Douglas County, Wisconsin, somehow has created 100 jobs, even though it hasn't begun yet.

"C3T Construction Co., a general contracting company in Milwaukee, listed 24 jobs retained for projects on which no work had begun and no stimulus money had been received."

"Owners at five Section 8 housing complexes in Madison and Milwaukee reported saving 38 jobs with more than $540,000 in additional rental assistance for low-income residents, though they acknowledged no new jobs were created."

"A Kentucky shoe store reported that it had created nine jobs with an $890 order for work boots."

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I read about the 900 dollar work boot order. The Kentucky shoe store is a small family business. They often supply workboots to the Army Corps of Engineers, but this time, after the order was filled, they were contacted by the Corps and told that because they'd received stimulus money, they needed to fill out a report. On that short online report there were only two options- had the money 'created' or 'saved' jobs. There were no other options presented. The owner couldn't figure it out, so he asked his daughter to help. There was a deadline, and she didn't know which it was, either. She called the Federal office several times trying to get them to explain which of those fit her business's situation, and never got much help. After working on it for 8 hours, she gave up and picked her best guest- and now they're famous. This whole story illustrates so much that is wrong with government meddling in what should be private decisions and contracts, and so many reasons why it's demonstrable that government can do nothing but really botch our health care (or just about any other private sector activity it takes over) .

Coyoteblog observes that we can stop believing the Whitehouse on job creation because they:

put themselves on record that they have absolutely no integrity in the process:

About two-thirds of the 14,506 jobs claimed to be saved under one federal office, the Administration for Children and Families at Health and Human Services, actually weren’t saved at all, according to a review of the latest data by The Associated Press. Instead, that figure includes more than 9,300 existing employees in hundreds of local agencies who received pay raises and benefits and whose jobs weren’t saved….

But officials defended the practice of counting raises as saved jobs.

“If I give you a raise, it is going to save a portion of your job,” HHS spokesman Luis Rosero said….

More than 250 other community agencies in the U.S. similarly reported saving jobs when using the money to give pay raises, to pay for training and continuing education, to extend employee work hours or to buy equipment, according to their spending reports.

Uh, right. So does this mean that the Administration’s pay Czar is destroying jobs by reducing salaries? Seems like one would have to take this position to be consistent. And wasn’t, by the same logic, AIG actually creating jobs with the now-infamous bonuses earlier this year?

By any measure, stimulus has failed, and that includes using the President's own measuring stick. Or does not he not need to be accountable for his promises?