Stimulus Spending And Job Growth: Update 10

Well, here we are again. Time to update of Obama's stimulus-driven job creation results. Let's look at the picture for March. 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. The jobless rate continues to generally follow the trajectory I had originally envisioned.



I have revised the January and February job figures according to the latest data from the US Dept of Labor. In January, 14,000 jobs were gained. In February, an equal amount or 14,000 jobs were lost. In March, a higher than expected 162,000 jobs were gained.

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 597,181 jobs per month -- in order to make up for the nearly 2.6 million jobs that have been lost since the stimulus bill was signed.

I was not one of the fortunate 162,000 but continue to remain unemployed.