Informed Speculation

…this is not good:

The United States economy shed 190,000 jobs in October, and the unemployment rate reached a 26-year high of 10.2 percent, up from 9.8 percent in September, the Department of Labor said Friday in its monthly economic appraisal.

While the pace of the job losses has slowed significantly since the peak of the recession last winter, the unemployment rate, which measures the number of people actively seeking work, continues to climb, and economists do not foresee relief until well into next year.

It’s time for people on both sides of the aisle to admit that the first stimulus was a failure and take some lessons learned away.  The number one problem the stimulus was meant to tackle was jobs, and we were told by the Administration that its passage would halt the unemployment slide at 8%.  That was spectacularly wrong.

The number one lesson is that Keynesian “prime the pump” “any spending is good spending” economics has once again proven to be in error.  All spending IS NOT good spending, and it DOES matter where the federal dollars are allocated.

We had a real opportunity here to make a coordinated effort to tackle our country’s aging infrastructure.   Instead, the stimulus bill became a typical Congressional pork-barrel affair with a little something for every pet interest group.

What we got was a higher deficit and an unemployment rate that hit the rate that we were direly warned we would hit if the bill didn’t pass.

This is a big-time failure, and no amount of spin will take that away…