Stimulus Spending And Job Growth: Update 17

Well, it's that time again. Time to update Obama's stimulus-driven job creation results. For the month of October, there was a net gain of 151,000 jobs. That's good news for President Obama, because there had been a string of net job losses for the last several months. August and September's job figures were also revised upwards according to the latest data from the US Dept of Labor. This meant fewer job losses in September than originally reported, and an actual net job gain for August (discounting the temporary census job losses).

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 his 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 was somewhat worse than I had predicted -- plotted as yellow and red. The trend generally followed the trajectory I had originally envisioned until about May of this year (Month 15). Obama's "Summer of Recovery" was virtually non-existent. Since May, job growth has essentially flat-lined.


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 1,471,000 jobs per month -- in order to make up for the 2 million jobs that were lost since the stimulus bill was signed.

According to US DOL statistics, the official unemployment rate continues to be 9.6%, because there are 14.8 million unemployed people in the United States who are actively seeking work. But there are another 2.6 million people who are only "marginally" attached to the work force because they did not seek work in the last month, and another 9.2 million people who are working part-time only because they can't find a full-time job.

I am sorry to once again report that I continue to remain unemployed. Activity has fallen off in recent weeks. I know God has a plan for me, but I continue to covet your prayers.