So Did that Economic Recovery Package Deliver? | GOOD
Early signs point to no. When our government sold us the economic recovery plan last winter, they gave us this chart. The light blue line was supposed to show the future unemployment rate if we didn’t pass the recovery plan. The dark blue line was supposed to be the (lower) unemployment rate we’d get if we passed the plan. The red notations (added by economist Greg Mankiw) are the actual unemployment numbers—worse than both scenarios.
Macroeconomists will be the first to tell you that macroeconomics is too complicated to be a predictive science. But still, this just has not turned out as planned, at least as far as unemployment goes. So is it better for an administration to make these shaky predictions and risk that they’ll be very wrong or to avoid them altogether?
P.S. Let’s hope this gets better.
