Word: economice
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Here's the play-by-play from a few days in mid-October. House Republicans wrote (and released to the public) a letter to the President in which they claimed that with the unemployment rate at 9.8%, "it is now evident that the massive 'stimulus' spending bill enacted months ago...
The next counter came in a memo to House Republicans from economist and former John McCain adviser Douglas Holtz-Eakin, who wrote, "Jobs keep disappearing ... and the Obama Administration's only apparent plan is to double down on a failed strategy for economic stimulus." The next day, the White House...
Who's right here? Well, first, the Republican argument that the stimulus is a bust because jobs have been lost fails a basic logic test. After last fall's global financial shock, the job market was going to be thrown for a loss no matter what. The issue is whether...
By that standard, we're doing O.K. But Bernstein and Christina Romer, the chairwoman of the President's Council of Economic Advisers, made the mistake of providing a more optimistic baseline last January - a forecast in which unemployment peaked at 9% without the stimulus bill and stayed below 8% with...
Unemployment has of course passed both those mileposts and is probably still rising. ("I have noticed," Bernstein says dryly.) This overshoot says more about the inadequacy of economic-forecasting models than about the efficacy of the stimulus. But the White House cites these same kinds of models in claiming that...