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Biden says 'everyone guessed wrong' on jobs number
Published in Saudi Press Agency on 14 - 06 - 2009


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, according to AP.
Biden said inaccuracies in unemployment predictions should
not undercut the White House's support of the $787 billion
economic revival plan that has not met the expectations of
President Barack 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 television's «Meet the
Press» from his hometown of Wilmington, Delaware.


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