I'm from the Government, and I'm Here to Help: Update!

On Friday I posted a graph showing how actual unemployment numbers resembled the White House estimates on Cialis. Today, via Veronique de Rugy and The American, we see that as the stimulus has been spent, unemployment has actually accelerated.

Give us money, and we’ll give you jobs. That was the promise President Barack Obama made when he asked Congress for a $789 billion stimulus bill back in January. The cash, the administration said, would create millions of jobs over the next two years.

Here was the argument as presented in the January report by the Council of Economic Advisors' Christina Romer and chief economist to the vice president Jared Bernstein, called “The Job Impact of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act”:

The U.S. economy has already lost nearly 2.6 million jobs since the business cycle peak in December 2007. In the absence of stimulus, the economy could lose another 3 to 4 million more. Thus, we are working to counter a potential total job loss of at least 5 million … even with the large [stimulus] prototypical package, the unemployment rate in 2010Q4 is predicted to be approximately 7.0%, which is well below the approximately 8.8% that would result in the absence of a plan.

Based in part on this argument, President Obama got his money. So what happened since then?

Using data from the president’s website Recovery.gov and data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, this chart shows the monthly increase in the unemployment rate in tandem with the administration’s stimulus spending.

Note that these are not promised dollars and estimated unemployment numbers; this is stimulus money that has been already been spent, and actual unemployment.