WASHINGTON — Vice President Joe Biden said Sunday that "everyone guessed wrong” on the impact of the economic stimulus, but he defended the administration’s spending designed to combat rising joblessness.
Biden said inaccuracies in unemployment predictions shouldn’t undercut the White House’s support of the $787 billion economic revival plan that has not met the expectations of the Obama team. Instead, he urged skeptics to look at teachers who kept their classroom assignments and police officers who kept their beats because of financial assistance from Washington.
"The bottom line is that jobs are being created that would not have been there before,” Biden said.
Just 10 days before taking office, Obama’s top economic advisers released a report predicting unemployment would remain at 8 percent or below through this year if an economic stimulus plan won congressional approval.
Yet the Bureau of Labor Statistics reports that unemployment in May rose to 9.4 percent.
"No one realized how bad the economy was. The projections, in fact, turned out to be worse. But we took the mainstream model as to what we thought — and everyone else thought — the unemployment rate would be,” Biden said.
The estimates were based on standard economic models, he said on NBC’s "Meet the Press.”
by the associated press
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