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Wait, you though we were serious about that?

You fucked up, you trusted us! CNS:

The White House economic adviser who determined in 2009 that if President Barack Obama’s stimulus bill were passed unemployment would not go above 8 percent, now says he was wrong and that he does not think unemployment will go below 8 percent before the end of 2012–the last year of the four-year term Obama won in 2008.

Jared Bernstein, the former chief economist and economic advisor to Vice President Joe Biden, wrote a report along with Christina Romer, the chairwoman of President Barack Obama’s Council of Economic Advisors, in January 2009 predicting that the stimulus would keep unemployment at less than 8 percent. On Monday, Bernstein told CNSNews.com that his projection was flawed.

[…]

When asked by CNSNews.com whether unemployment would fall below 8 percent before the end of 2012, Bernstein said, “Unlikely that it would go below 8 percent before the end of 2012. I think the most optimistic forecast would be for about eight-and-a-half percent.”

On the glass half full side for Obama, at least Bernstein isn’t on national TV laughing with fellow leftists about how the economy is “pretty darn fucked.”

So he’s got that going for him. Plus, pimped out megabuses!

27 Replies to “Wait, you though we were serious about that?”

  1. happyfeet says:

    need mor food stamps

  2. B. Moe says:

    8 or 8.5% getting unemployment checks on election day, huh?

    I think Obama is going to need more votes than that, I guess we will see.

  3. mojo says:

    “…pimped out megabuses!”

    That reminds me – where can I get a “We Brake for NOBODY!” bumper sticker?

  4. sdferr says:

    The American Presidency is kind of the mirror opposite of Gyges’ Ring. Put it on and make the invisible visible.

  5. newrouter says:

    “Wait, you though we”

    you need a t

  6. Squid says:

    The T Party stole ’em all.

  7. Slartibartfast says:

    You clearly don’t understand Teh Narrative, Jeff. Teh Narrative now says that we are over 8% unemployed now because we didn’t spend enough porkulus. Because government is the driving force behind the economy, not *spit* commerce.

  8. newrouter says:

    thank god they didn’t disturb the rock stacks

    El Paso says that it is a good corporate citizen and environmental steward, and no doubt it is. But companies have also learned that they’re lucky when projects of this magnitude come in merely 23% off budget, and they know that the true risks and unmanageable costs aren’t Oregon rain storms but inflexible regulators and political opposition. El Paso was sued eight separate times to shut down the Ruby, and some litigation is still pending.

    More to the point, all of this—spending years in government pre-planning, rerouting an energy corridor to avoid rock piles—carries a large economic price. Capital expenditures on archeologists and bird courtship could be put to more productive use elsewhere in the economy. The Ruby saga isn’t remarkable except in how unremarkable it is, how routine, and this ordeal replicated countless times across the entire economy helps to explain why the recovery is so mediocre.

    The current White House did not create all of this regulatory burden. But the stringency and complexity of the current Federal Register of rules does illustrate the insanity of adding even more pages. As President Obama has ruefully acknowledged, there’s no such thing as a shovel-ready project. As he hasn’t acknowledged, the reason isn’t a lack of projects but an excess of government.

    Link

  9. LBascom says:

    Last decade I was riding a road grader steady.

    Last week I was riding a jack-hammer.

    This week I got noth’in.

  10. Ernst Schreiber says:

    Because government is the driving force behind the economy, not *spit* commerce.

    Has anybody made Keynesianism work other than Khufu, Khafre, and Menkaura?

    Seriously.

  11. MissFixit says:

    All the hand wringing about “Perry needs to court independents like Obama does!” makes no sense, considering that with unemployment this high supposedly a ham sandwich could defeat O.

  12. LBascom says:

    Oh, this will end well, I’m sure…

    They’re official, effective Monday — new boundaries for California’s Assembly, Senate and Congressional Districts.

    The maps were adopted by the Citizens Redistricting Commission, and they’ll be used over the next decade in elections for all 120 seats in the state legislature, 53 Congressional seats and four seats on the State Board of Equalization.
    elections2.jpg

    But some Republicans are not happy, and late Monday afternoon, officials from the state GOP and the Senate Republican caucus said they’ll support a signature-gathering drive aimed at overturning the newly drawn Senate districts.

    That referendum drive will be led by a coalition called Fairness and Accountability in Redistricting.

    And some Republicans in Congress are also not happy — they say a court challenge might be in the offing.

    But Citizens Commission members say that numerous lawyers looked over their work, and they’re confident it will weather any legal challenge.

  13. mojo says:

    Any bets in if (and how high) the Commission was stacked?

  14. mongo78 says:

    #8 NR – I’m up to my neck in the permitting of large utility projects, and as a rule of thumb i’d say that we’re lucky if we only spend 10-20% of the capital cost on meeting the regulatory burden. if we’re unlucky we spend 100% of the cost on permitting and get nothing to show for it.

    the really dirty secret is how the process creates all kinds of opportunities for legal corruption.

  15. urthshu says:

    Any bets on how a second Porkulus would be spent?

  16. Squid says:

    My old man broke ground on his project yesterday. Only a year late!

  17. geoffb says:

    “I know it’s not election season yet, but I just have to mention the debate,” where Republicans said they would not increase taxes under virtually any circumstance, Obama said at a town hall. “Think about that. That’s just not common sense.”

    So common sense is to raise taxes under virtually any circumstance?

  18. sdferr says:

    Has Obama gotten around to blaming the miserable US economy on the Hubble Constant yet? If not, what the fuck is he waiting for?

  19. Dave in SoCal says:

    OT: Rick Perry’s reference to a “big black cloud” was a racial crack at Obama, wasn’t it?

    Dammit! If only we had someone on the conservative side willing to wade in and tackle the subject of language and how we need to reject outright someone else’s interpretation of our words.

    Somebody call Commissioner Gordon and have him light up the Armadillo Signal!

  20. cranky-d says:

    Not Hubble. Planck.

  21. cranky-d says:

    Ed Schultz chopped up the quote to make it sound like it did. He, like his compatriots, is scum.

  22. sdferr says:

    Oh hell, why quibble cranky-d, use ’em both.

  23. newrouter says:

    The law is often expressed by the equation v = H0D, with H0 the constant of proportionality (the Hubble constant) between the “proper distance” D to a galaxy (which can change over time, unlike the comoving distance) and its velocity v (i.e. the derivative of proper distance with respect to cosmological time coordinate; see Comoving distance#Uses of the proper distance for some discussion of the subtleties of this definition of ‘velocity’). The SI unit of H0 is s?1 but it is most frequently quoted in (km/s)/Mpc, thus giving the speed in km/s of a galaxy 1 megaparsec (3.09×1019 km) away. The reciprocal of H0 is the Hubble time.

    Link

  24. newrouter says:

    ho,ho,ho

    Seattle’s ‘green jobs’ program a bust
    By VANESSA HO, SEATTLEPI.COM STAFF
    Published 10:07 p.m., Monday, August 15, 2011

    Last year, Seattle Mayor Mike McGinn announced the city had won a coveted $20 million federal grant to invest in weatherization. The unglamorous work of insulating crawl spaces and attics had emerged as a silver bullet in a bleak economy – able to create jobs and shrink carbon footprint – and the announcement came with great fanfare.

    McGinn had joined Vice President Joe Biden in the White House to make it. It came on the eve of Earth Day. It had heady goals: creating 2,000 living-wage jobs in Seattle and retrofitting 2,000 homes in poorer neighborhoods.

    But more than a year later, Seattle’s numbers are lackluster. As of last week, only three homes had been retrofitted and just 14 new jobs have emerged from the program. Many of the jobs are administrative, and not the entry-level pathways once dreamed of for low-income workers. Some people wonder if the original goals are now achievable.

    Link

  25. urthshu says:

    >>The reciprocal of H0 is the Hubble time.

    Please, Hubble, don’t hurt ’em!

  26. geoffb says:

    We should, for our own ease, be measuring the time between lies by Obama and his MSM minions using Planck time units whereas to measure the timescale for improvements to the nations economy Hubble time units will be more useful.

  27. I attended the redistricting public hearings. Everyone, GOP, Democrat and guy who wrote about tribbles, was in agreement about where the new lines should be and offered concrete reasons why.

    The redistricting commission COMPLETELY ignored the will of the people. ALL the people.

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