Stimulus Spending And Job Growth: Update 13

Well, it's that time again. Time to update Obama's stimulus-driven job creation results. Let's look at the latest picture. In June, there was a net loss of 125,000 jobs, but this job loss number was due primarily to the layoff of 225,000 temporary census workers. However, since I did not include the temporary census workers in last month's job increases, I cannot then include them here. Therefore, in the graph below, I have discounted the census job losses and allowed for a net gain of 100,000 jobs. The unemployment rate dropped from 9.7% to 9.5% because about 650,000 people dropped out of the work force.

Barack Obama said his stimulus package would create approximately 4 million "new" jobs over two years. In order to create 4 million jobs in 24 months, the Obama administration would have had to create approximately 166,667 jobs per month to reach his target, assuming linear job growth. That scenario is shown as violet in the following graph.

I developed a curve showing what I thought might be a more "Likely" scenario -- plotted as light blue in the following graph. As you can see from the graph, the actual trend of job losses was somewhat worse than I had predicted -- plotted as yellow and red. However, the trend continues to generally follow the trajectory I had originally envisioned.


I have revised the April and May job figures according to the latest data from the US Dept of Labor. Now, instead of having to create 166,667 new jobs per month to reach his original target of 4 million new jobs, President Obama now needs to create 754,375 jobs per month -- in order to make up for the more than 2 million jobs that were lost since the stimulus bill was signed.

I am sorry to once again report that I was not one of those fortunate 100,000 who found work in June. I should also point out that, in my opinion, the current trend has had little or nothing to do with Obama's Stimulus Package. Rather, it was the result of a natural economic recovery which would have occurred anyway. I would go even further and suggest that the policies of this President and this Congress have only acted to slow down the recovery.