Actual Unemployment vs. Obama’s Prediction

The light blue line is the curve the Obama admin­is­tra­tion said would hap­pen if we passed the stim­u­lus bill.  The dark blue curve is what they said would hap­pen if we didn’t.  The red dots show what is actu­ally happening.

The graph is from innocentbystanders.net.

As you can see, the Obama admin­is­tra­tion grossly under­es­ti­mated the unem­ploy­ment lev­els.  If you asked Axel­rod, I’m sure he’d say “if we didn’t pass the stim­u­lus, unem­ploy­ment would be even worse!”

The log­i­cal come-back would be — “How do you know when you were so cer­tain that unem­ploy­ment would be so much lower today?”

The fact of the mat­ter is the admin­is­tra­tion isn’t bas­ing any of its moves on the fun­da­men­tal laws of eco­nom­ics.  They’re pulling shit out of their ass because that’s what they feel like doing.

And our soci­ety is pay­ing an awe­some price.  The aggre­gate cost of hav­ing politi­cians in our great Wash­ing­ton D.C. halls who are near com­pletely igno­rant of the fun­da­men­tal laws of eco­nom­ics is stag­ger­ing.  But I guess it’s worth it to most to have their feel­ings mas­saged by the fact that they believe some mighty leader is look­ing out for them…