Biden says 'everyone guessed wrong' on jobs number
50 minutes ago

WASHINGTON (AP) — Vice President Joe Biden said Sunday that "everyone guessed wrong" on the impact of the economic stimulus, but he defended the administration's spending designed to combat rising joblessness.

Biden said inaccuracies in unemployment predictions shouldn't undercut the White House's support of the $787 billion economic revival plan that has not met the expectations of President Obama's team. Instead, the vice president urged skeptics to look at teachers who kept their classroom assignments and police officers who kept their beats because of financial assistance from Washington.

"The bottom line is that jobs are being created that would not have been there before," Biden said.

But they are not coming at the pace first estimated.

Just 10 days before taking office, Obama's top economic advisers released a report predicting unemployment would remain at 8 percent or below through this year if an economic stimulus plan won congressional approval.

Yet the Bureau of Labor Statistics reports that unemployment in May rose to 9.4 percent.

Biden said the White House is keenly aware of the gap between the rhetoric used to sell fast passage of the legislation and the reality that has 14.5 million people unemployed. The administration had predicted that the stimulus bill would create or save as many as 3.5 million jobs.

"No one realized how bad the economy was. The projections, in fact, turned out to be worse. But we took the mainstream model as to what we thought — and everyone else thought — the unemployment rate would be," Biden said.

Those projects came from a report co-written by Biden's chief economist, Jared Bernstein. Last week, Bernstein briefed reporters on the stimulus spending and insisted the report was in line with others' research, but not aligned with reality.

"At the time our forecast seemed reasonable. Now, looking back, it was clearly too optimistic," he told reporters last Monday.

The White House has tapped Biden as its chief spokesman on that economic stimulus plan, sending him across the country to drum up support for a plan that has yet to make the impact it promised. On Thursday and Friday, Biden visited Pennsylvania, Kansas and Michigan to highlight projects the stimulus has funded.

The vice president said losses each month have dropped, although the economy is still losing jobs.

"Can I claim credit that all of that's due to the recovery package? No. But it clearly has had an impact," Biden said.

Biden said the estimates were based on standard economic models.

"Everyone guessed wrong at the time the estimate was made about what the state of the economy was at the moment this was passed," Biden said.

Biden appeared Sunday on NBC's "Meet the Press" from his hometown of Wilmington, Del.

Copyright © 2009 The Associated Press. All rights reserved.

People need to wake up ..... sadly they're to busy with sucking up the the Marxist, apologist POS and are waiting for their "fair share" without having to lift a finger.

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I seem to remember the Republicans unanimously voting against this idiocy because it wouldn't work and was an immense waste of money.  Oh, except for Specter, Snowe, and Collins.  I forgot about the RINO traitors in the Senate, at least one of them is where he belongs now, and is guaranteed to lose his seat next election to a regular Democrat.  Serves the bastard right.

There was an article in the Washington Post about how the Democrats are now concerned about the stimulus spending.  Not because it's wasteful sops to their supporters and special interests.  Not because it would triple the national debt.  Not because it would undermine the credit of the USA, but because it might adversely effect their fortunes in the next few elections.

Congress is the single biggest problem facing America.  Too many stupid, short-sighted fools in charge of way too much money and power over us.

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The less people that wake up, the better.  Gives us all more time to prepare for the cataclysm that awaits us...

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The less people that wake up, the better.  Gives us all more time to prepare for the cataclysm that awaits us...

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You know, if you mentally edit Biden's statement above and compare it to the Bush admin's statements on the presence––or non-presence of WMDs in Iraq, there are some similarities.

Now, IIRC, then Dems were all over Bush, et al. for using flawed intel, but it's OK for the NoBama admin to do the same?

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Congress is the single biggest problem facing America.  Too many stupid, short-sighted fools in charge of way too much money and power over us.

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Congress is the single biggest problem facing America.  Too many stupid, short-sighted fools in charge of way too much money and power over us.

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More stimulus will fix this.

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More stimulus will fix this.

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Bend over and prepare for "Stimulus II."

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The mainstream press has been trumpeting that the recession has finally bottomed out and that we are on the way to too a bumpy recovery.

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Joe Biden's a fool and an ass. There's no guessing involved. You look at numbers and they tell a story. That's the problem with donkeys. They think with their hearts, not their brains.

Today those asswipes are pushing national healthcare under the ASSumption it'll save money. PURE BS!

We owe $35K for every man, woman and child in the U.S. based on the national debt. We can't afford yet another entitlement. There are no free lunches.



'Nuff said.                  

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Yep. A person doesn't have to be smart and noble to get into Congress, they just have to get elected.

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We are being raped by the big penis of big government.

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Biden's suck a fucking jackoff that I almost like him.

Weird.

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Our elected officials were wrong??????

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Congress is the single biggest problem facing America.  Too many stupid, short-sighted fools in charge of way too much money and power over us.

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You know, if you mentally edit Biden's statement above and compare it to the Bush admin's statements on the presence––or non-presence of WMDs in Iraq, there are some similarities.

Now, IIRC, then Dems were all over Bush, et al. for using flawed intel, but it's OK for the NoBama admin to do the same?

Oh, and spare me this BS about "saved" jobs.  There's no way to track that sort of thing, never has been.  It's cleverly combined with the word "created".  So, NoBama says "We lost 100K jobs last month, but it would have been a LOT worse if we had not created or saved 1,000,000 jobs."  Pure snake oil; he can't prove a word about what he's saying about this.