Costello: Obama Now Owns Economy

What too many people fail to recall, and in many cases I consider this willful amnesia, is that Obama’s sales pitch for the first stimulus package included a promise that, if passed, unemployment would rise no higher than 8 percent. Without the stimulus package, Obama’s economic team (which includes Romer), predicted that unemployment might rise as high as 9 percent. For reference, the official unemployment rate is now 10.2 percent.. And that’s an underestimate. When one considers the underemployed and those who have given up trying to find a job, the real unemployment rate is actually about 16 percent or 17 percent. The “recovery act is working exactly as intended.”Obama promised that he would create or save 3.5 million jobs. But recently the Obama administration boasted that it had “created or saved” a somewhat more modest 650,000 jobs, a number repeated uncritically over and over last weekend by the Obama-approved real news organization, CNN/ Michael Costello , Lewiston Tribune. Full column below .

Question: Should Obama try to boost the economy by trying to pass another massive stimulus package?