Wednesday, May 13, 2009

Whoops!

Good news people!! We now do seem to have some initial numbers on the fiscal multiplier.

Christina Romer and Jared Bernstein's (in)famous report entitled "The Job Impact of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Plan" included a graph of the projected path of the unemployment rate with and without the stimulus package. It's on page 4 of the linked document.

Well the good people from Innocent Bystanders have taken this graph and chunked on the actual unemployment numbers from March and April. That graph looks like this:



Yes, you are reading it right. The actual numbers are marginally ABOVE the "no stimulus bill" path. From this I conclude that either (A) the stimulus wasn't very stimulating, or (B) the authors are fairly poor forecasters, or (C) all of the above.

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

Awesome follow-up.

New Hampshire or Montana to secede?

...Please?

(Mungowitz and Angus, you guys gotta do something, seriously, the federal ooze just won't stop: Obama now wants to guarantee all muni bonds. What a power grab. What a waste of money.)

"Help me Obi-Wan, you're my only hope."

ardyanovich said...

hmmm. I guess they're gonna have some splanin' to do if the actual unemployment numbers from here on out are greater than the projected numbers without a recovery plan. It's just too bad I can't laugh about it.

Tom said...

Reality bites.

OTH, the USSR hung on for 70 years despite much worse economic policies. I can't wait that long. Here's to American Glasnost