Stimulus Spending And Job Growth: Update 9

Well, as promised, I was more timely this month in my update of Obama's stimulus-driven job creation results. With that, let's look at the picture for February. 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 this 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 is somewhat worse than I had predicted -- plotted as yellow and red. While the jobless rate continues to generally follow the trajectory I had originally envisioned, it now seems to be diverging at a greater pace. The gradual uptick in job growth I anticipated has not occurred.


I have revised the December and January job figures according to the latest data from the US Dept of Labor. In December, 109,000 jobs were lost. In January, 26,000 jobs were lost. And in February, 36,000 jobs were lost.

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 566,083 jobs per month -- in order to make up for the nearly 2.9 million jobs that have been lost since the stimulus bill was signed.

Don't hold your breath.