Stimulus Spending And Job Growth: Update 20

Well, it's that time again. Time to update Obama's stimulus-driven job creation results. For the month of January, there was a net gain of 36,000 jobs. That is REALLY bad news for President Obama, because it is once again lower than analysts had predicted. November and December's job figures were revised upwards slightly according to the latest data from the US Dept of Labor.

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). Since then, job growth has been very anemic.


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 5,558,000 jobs during the remaining one month of his projected 24 month period (in order to make up for the nearly 2 million jobs that were lost since the stimulus bill was signed). He's cutting it close, but I'm sure that if President Obama puts his mind to it, HE CAN DO IT!

According to US DOL statistics, the official unemployment rate dropped to 9.0%, because the number of people looking for work dropped from 14.5 million to 13.9 million. In other words, 600,000 people dropped out of the work force. This is on top of the 2.8 million people who were already "marginally" attached to the work force because they did not actively seek work during the last month and therefore were not included in the numbers. And there were another 8.4 million people who were working part-time because their hours had been cut or because they could not find a full-time job. But have no fear, OBAMA IS HERE!

For those of you who may be interested, my new job in Tennessee is going well so far. Glad to be working. Glad to be a contributing member of society. Thank God that Obama found this job for me.

(:D)