Unemployment Hits 9.8%
02 October 2009 11:09 am by Taylor Marsh
Stocks are up. Ben Bernanke says that the recession is over. And I sense a growing willingness among movers and shakers to declare “Mission Accomplished” when it comes to fighting the slump. It’s time, I keep hearing, to shift our focus from economic stimulus to the budget deficit. No, it isn’t. And the complacency now setting in over the state of the economy is both foolish and dangerous. … – Paul Krugman
Worse than expected. Much worse.
Watching this from the outside, as someone who doesn’t write much about the economy, leaving that to experts, I’ve been waiting for quite some time for this column from Krugman. That all this hits on the weekend where Michael Moore’s movie goes wide is no coincidence. Neither is the fact that Mr. Moore is advertising big on Drudge (but not on progressive new media sites). Talk about capitalism, a love story, something to which not even Mr. Moore is immune.
… Yes, the Federal Reserve and the Obama administration have pulled us “back from the brink” — the title of a new paper by Christina Romer, who leads the Council of Economic Advisers. She argues convincingly that expansionary policy saved us from a possible replay of the Great Depression.
But while not having another depression is a good thing, all indications are that unless the government does much more than is currently planned to help the economy recover, the job market — a market in which there are currently six times as many people seeking work as there are jobs on offer — will remain terrible for years to come. …
When people see Moore’s movie it’s likely to hit them like a steel mallet in the kisser. Everything is in it to make people madder at a moment when health care is cresting. The public option being talked about a lot more seriously, even if Harry Reid thinks by public option we mean simply competition. Ah, it’s all in the definition, isn’t it?
Appreciating that Barack Obama came into office inheriting cascading catastrophes, as Moore has said ad nauseam in interviews, I still wonder if a year from now if circumstances are the same, whether Democrats are going to be given slack if 9.8% turns into 10, or for that matter stays flat. That’s not how mid-term elections historically work, especially when Obama promised otherwise from the start.
Didn’t Pres. Obama pitch that the stimulus must be passed immediately for things to recover? His advisers saying even more: Obama advisers had predicted that his stimulus package would hold unemployment at or below 8 percent.
I doubt anyone will buy the next pitch, that if the stimulus hadn’t passed things would be much worse.
One word: JOBS. It’s a topic that’s been mostly missing since Obama took office.
