The June 2010 employment numbers are in and overall employment was down 225,000 (mostly because of lower census activity). Private employment was expected to grow by 100,000 to 200,000 jobs but only 83,000 jobs were created in June-far below projections.
Is anyone else starting to think these guys in the White House don’t know what they’re doing?
That statement might come off as a cheap insult but it isn’t far from the truth. Just take a look at this handy chart (h/t Nick Schulz at the Enterprise Blog) from a J.P. Morgan research report which examines the prior private sector experience of some 432 cabinet officials since 1900. One can easily see that President Obama doesn’t see private sector experience to be a must-have item on one’s resume.
And over at the Foundry, Conn Carroll reminds us that the Vice President said that this summer was going to be the “summer of recovery.” How’s that working out for you, Joe?
On June 17, Vice President Joe Biden crashed the daily White House press briefing to kick off the Obama administration’s “Recovery Summer,” a six-week-long campaign to promote the belief that “the Recovery Act is working.” VP Biden claimed: “We knew that the hole dug by the recession that was created by the policies of the last administration resulted in a loss, a real loss of somewhere between $2 trillion and $3 trillion in the economy. We never thought that $787 billion was going to fill those holes – that hole.”
There are so many things wrong with this statement, but we’ll identify just three: 1) according to the Congressional Budget Office, the cost of Obama’s stimulus has soared past $787 billion and now stands at $862 billion; 2) data show that as bad as Biden makes the current recession out to be, more jobs were lost in the first seven quarters of the 2001 recession than were lost in the first seven quarters of this recession; 3) Biden’s personal economic adviser, Jared Bernstein, co-authored a January 9, 2009, report promising the American people that the Obama stimulus would never allow unemployment to rise above 8% and guaranteeing that the U.S. economy would support 138.6 million jobs by December 2010.
So by the White House’s own standard, what verdict does the actual real world data give the Obama stimulus? The Labor Department’s Bureau of Labor and Statistics released its monthly jobs report today showing the economy lost 125,000 jobs in June as 225,000 temporary Census jobs ended. Just 83,000 private sector jobs were created in June. All told the U.S. economy has now lost 2.3 million jobs since President Barack Obama signed his stimulus bill and his administration is now 7.4 million jobs short of what he promised the American economy would support by 2010. There is only one word that can adequately describe the gulf between the President’s economic promises and his economic performance: failure