Ross Douthat references the below chart in his New York Times column today: That's the chart put together by Obama Administration key advisers Christine Romer and Jared Bernstein during the push for the Stimulus Bill. Douthat refers to it as an "unfortunate chart:" The first line — the hopeful line, the one that was used to sell $800 billion worth of stimulus — showed the rate of joblessness peaking this fall at 8 percent, and dropping swiftly thereafter. The second line — the no-stimulus scenario — showed unemployment peaking at 9 percent, holding there across 2010, and then declining in 2011 and 2012. Now reality has produced numbers of its own. In every month since May, the unemployment rate has been roughly a percentage point higher than the chart’s grimmer, stimulus-free scenario. This October, when Obama’s advisers predicted that unemployment would stand at 8 percent with the stimulus and just under 9 percent without it, the actual jobless rate leaped to 10.4 percent. This dire figure isn’t Barack Obama’s fault. Even in an age of near-trillion-dollar spending sprees, the president of the United States has only limited influence over the unemployment numbers. But the White House spent the winter pretending otherwise. The stimulus bill was framed and sold primarily as a jobs bill, and the Obama administration placed a substantial bet on the promise that the unemployment rate would start dropping before 2010 arrived. The rest of Douthat's piece focuses on the political rather than the economic landscape. But if one thing is clear after these last 14 months, it is that you can not separate the two. So if Douthat is right, there may not be a lot of political capital to spend on some of the proposals floating about for Washington to tackle the unemployment problem. But that doesn't mean they aren't worth exploring, debating, considering, shooting down (circle one) here. Douthat's NYT opinion page neighbor Paul Krugman , for instance, put forward the idea of adopting "European-style employment policies" like job sharing programs . And the Roosevelt Institute is running a series of "big ideas" from economists and historians for the next two weeks. For example, L. Randall Wray , economics professor at University of Missouri-Kansas City, proposes a "New Deal-style jobs program." Read his idea here .
Filed under: New Deal, unemployment, paul krugman, american recovery and reinvestment act, job growth, job sharing, Ross Douthat, jobs porgrams, job loss, full employment, L Randall Wray