In a rare press conference from the most transparent administration in history, Obama promised today that the unemployment rate will be going down. This announcement comes on the heels of the unemployment rate increasing to 9.8% last week.
According to Obama, when asked by a Bloomberg reporter, “My expectation is that the unemployment rate is going to be going down because the economy is growing. It’s, uh, and even though it is going to be growing more slowly than I would like, it’s still growing. Now, uh, how fast is it going to go down? How quickly, uhhh, is the economy going to grow? When are, uh, private sector businesses going to start making the investments that are… going to start actually hiring people again? There are a lot of economists out there that are struggling with that question.”
The Obama administration has been unsuccessful in all attempts to turn the economy around. And, under their watch, they have done fine work in making sure that the unemployment rate stays high and continues to head higher. So any announcement from them on the direction of the economy should be tossed out the window.
Just remember that at the time of the “stimulus” debate, the Obama administration was selling the snake-oil argument that passage of the “stimulus” bill would hold unemployment at/around 8%. As we all now know, that was not true. As Time magazine noted, “Back in early January [2009], when Barack Obama was still President-elect, two of his chief economic advisers — leading proponents of a stimulus bill — predicted that the passage of a large economic-aid package would boost the economy and keep the unemployment rate below 8%. It hasn’t quite worked out that way.”
