Those 150k jobs that were saved or created.

I'm sure everyone has seen the chart by this point comparing Obama's prediction with and without the stimulus to the actual unemployment data. What I find interesting is the comparison of the trend line with the stimulus to Obama's new model of what would have happened without the stimulus.

Using the May BLS numbers for jobless claims we get 13,973,000 unemployed with 9.4% unemployment. I don't remember how to get the payroll numbers out of BLS data, so let's presume that it's exactly 9.4% and there are 148,648,936 people considered. That means that under Obama's predictions in January we would now have around 8.3% unemployment without the stimulus or 7.8% with. We passed the stimulus and we're now at 9.4%. So how far is his original estimate of 7.8% from the actual data at 9.4%? Well 148,648,936*.078 = 11,594,617 or a difference of 2,378,383 jobs.

The claim now is that that 9.4% number is much better than it would have been because he has "created or saved" 150,000 jobs. For the sake of argument, lets assume that his predictions were 2.3 million jobs off and yet his estimate of jobs created or saved is deadly accurate. How much worse would it be if we hadn't passed a trillion dollars in spending? That would be 150/(148648+150) or — wait for it — .1%.

Great.