Pethokoukis: Did the 2009 Stimulus Really Perform Just as Team Obama Expected?

I, and others, have given the Obama administration a lot of flack for its early 2009 prediction that its $800 billion stimulus plan would drive the unemployment rate to under 6% by 2012. The fact that unemployment is over 8% might lead one to conclude that those fancy economic models with their Keynesian multipliers were wrong.

But Obama supporters defend the forecast by arguing that White House economists were basing that prediction on incomplete numbers that didn’t reflect the true severity of the downturn. Once the data were revised, White House economists seemingly made more accurate predictions.

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