Back in February, President Obama said that he would consider the $787 billion economic stimulus successful if it creates or saves 4 million jobs. Then, last month, the Obama administration said that the plan will create or save 600,000 jobs in the following 100 days. It's tricky to tell if that projection panned out, but according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the U.S. has shed just under 3.5 million jobs since the year began. Those gloomy numbers have caused some to call for a second stimulus package, but the Obama administration says that's not needed at the moment.
After the jump, a chart of jobs lost, gained and projected.
The buzz in the past few weeks has been that we've entered a slow recovery period. But "recovery" is tricky to define. Technically, recessions are defined largely by gross domestic product, whether the overall economy is growing or shrinking. But for most people, a recovery is all about employment.
The American economy gained 11,044,000 jobs between 2000 and the end of 2007, when the recession began. Since the downturn began, we've lost 5.7 million jobs. Even with the White House's best-case scenario of the stimulus creating 4 million jobs, we'd still be down 1.7 million jobs since the recession began — and we'd be nowhere near the sort of employment growth we've seen for the past decade.
In a Washington Post op-ed this weekend, Obama wrote that the stimulus "was not expected to restore the economy to full health on its own but to provide the boost necessary to stop the free fall." As you can see from the chart above, job losses seem to have slowed — but we've got a long way to go to get back to where we were.
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