Where Is The Accountability For Obama On The Economy?

The economy is a mess.

Unemployment still stands at 9.5%. Add in the people who stopped looking for jobs because the job market is so bad or the people working only part time but wanting full time work and you get a figure closer to 19% of the entire country either underemployed or unemployed.

That's just incredible.

Back in January 2009, the Obama administration said unemployment would rise to 9% WITHOUT the '09 stimulus package and projected unemployment to be closer to 8% with it.

Wow - were they REALLY wrong!

Unemployment hit double digits, has hovered between 9.5%-10% since and is expected to RISE again before the end of the year as GDP growth slows.

In fact 9% unemployment and 18% underemployment may be the new normal for the 21st century.

So what happened?

What happened is the stimulus package SUCKED.

It wasn't large enough, it didn't actually employ people, it was used for bullshit ideological items like giving Arne Duncan $4.3 billion in walking around money for Race to the Top.

Add to the unemployment problem the GDP problem. We're headed back into negative territory:

The government’s preliminary estimate for economic growth in the second quarter is likely to be revised substantially lower.

This preliminary estimate of gross domestic product growth, which was released on July 30, reported that the nation’s output grew at an annual rate of 2.4 percent in the spring. This tepid growth was nothing to write home about, since it was a big step downward from growth rates in the previous two quarters. (The economy grew at an annual rate of 3.7 percent in the first quarter of the year, and 5 percent in the last quarter of 2009.)

But even that 2.4 percent annual rate is now looking too rosy.

Many of the inputs that government economists use to estimate G.D.P. each quarter are rough estimates based on incomplete data. Slowly, more complete data are rolling in.

As we noted last week, more complete data on the inventory component of G.D.P. shows that the overall growth rate was worse than expected.

And today, the Commerce Department reported that the trade deficit in June was wider than expected. Trade is also incorporated into the calculation of G.D.P., and a wider trade deficit means an even smaller gain gross domestic product.

Right now it’s looking like second quarter G.D.P. growth was only half as big as initially estimated.

“Combining the bigger-than-expected trade deficit with other weak data suggests that Q2 growth was only 1.2 percent rather than the 2.4 percent originally estimated, placing the economy on even shakier ground than it seemed,” wrote Nigel Gault, chief United States economist at IHS Global Insight, “and underlining why the Fed has shifted towards an easing bias.”

It was in the second half of the year - Q3 and Q4 - when the stimulus money has completely faded away that GDP was expected to see a large drop.

If the drop is ALREADY happening in Q2, well, Q3 and Q4 may be REALLY ugly.

Wall Street finally woke up to that fact today. As of 1:00 PM, the Dow is down 248 points.

Now who knows, the Big Casino On Wall Street may end up for the day, but the long term picture remains the same.

Economic activity is decreasing.

Unemployment is as big a problem now as it was when Barack Obama first took office.

And it is going to get WORSE before it gets better.

It may be this bad FOR YEARS.

And yet, the only accountability we hear from the administration is for teachers.

There is NO accountability for Larry Summers, Timmeh Geithner or Barack Obama - the three men MOST responsible for the CURRENT economic mess.

And Ben Bernanke got renominated to the Federal Reserve, so there was no accountability there either.

Yes,the economic mess started under Bush. But the Obama people have done LITTLE to NOTHING to make things better.

Unfortunately before Barack Obama becomes a one term president and is himself unemployed, he will see many more people fired and laid off.

Many of those will be purposeful (i.e., teachers as part of the RttT and NCLB Jr. programs.)

Obama calls those firings "accountability."

It comes from all the testing data he wants tracked and collated.

Looking at the economic data, it is quite clear that Larry Summers, Timmeh Geithner and Barack Obama himself ought to be fired.

But silly, RBE - accountability isn't for THEM.

It is only for teachers.