Obamateurism of the Day

I know that Barack Obama has to sell his rapidly-sinking economic plan as hard but restorative medicine for the current recession, but in his Thanksgiving address, Obama apparently thinks that voters can’t read unemployment data — or the White House’s own charts. Obama tried blaming Bush again for the current pain on “cycles of boom and bust,” but the data hardly supports that conclusion:

The investments we have made and tough steps we have taken have helped break the back of the recession, and now our economy is finally growing again. But as I said when I took office, job recovery from this crisis would not come easily or quickly. Though the job losses we were experiencing earlier this year have slowed dramatically, we’re still not creating enough new jobs each month to make up for the ones we’re losing. And no matter what the economists say, for families and communities across the country, this recession will not end until we completely turn that tide.

So we’ve made progress. But we cannot rest – and my administration will not rest – until we have revived this economy and rebuilt it stronger than before; until we are creating jobs and opportunities for middle class families; until we have moved beyond the cycles of boom and bust – of reckless risk and speculation – that led us to so much crisis and pain these past few years.

Well, let’s look at the data at the Bureau of Labor Statistics and check out those “boom and bust” cycles, shall we? Over the nine years previous to Obama’s election, the unemployment rate ranged from a low of 3.8% in 2000 to to a high of 6.6% in October 2008 in the current recession. On an annual basis, we have a low average of 3.97% in 2000 and a high of 5.99% in 2003. The median unemployment over those nine years was 4.95%, which means that the booms and busts were only a full percentage point of deviation from the annual averages, and the monthly ups and downs less than two percentage points in each direction from the median. That hardly seems to support the notion of “booms and busts” over “these past few years.”

And one only needs to look at the projections of the Obama administration to realize that Obama has little clue as to unemployment and pain. Recall that the Obama administration demanded and got $787 billion in stimulus fund with the explicit purpose of keeping unemployment at 8%. Even if one accepts that as a sort of reference median, even though it would have been the highest unemployment level in over a decade, the White House plan clearly has failed to even out the “boom and bust” cycle. The current unemployment rate, 10.2%, is 2.2 points over the 8% target the White House said it could hold with all of that money. That is higher than any unemployment level over the median during the entire nine years prior to Obama’s election.

What we’re seeing now is a bust — and that bust is called Obamanomics, and unfortunately, it doesn’t look it’s going to cycle out any time soon.

Got an Obamateurism of the Day? If you see a foul-up by Barack Obama, e-mail it to me at obamaisms@edmorrissey.com with the quote and the link to the Obamateurism. I’ll post the best Obamateurisms on a daily basis, depending on how many I receive. Include a link to your blog, and I’ll give some link love as well. And unlike Slate, I promise to end the feature when Barack Obama leaves office.

Illustrations by Chris Muir of Day by Day. Be sure to read the adventures of Sam, Zed, Damon, and Jan every day!

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