Facebook Twitter Tumblr Close Skip to main content
A Project of The Annenberg Public Policy Center

More Unemployment Blues

If you’re the glass-half-full type, you might think it’s good news that the nation’s unemployment rate was largely unchanged from May to June. It crept up just 0.1 percentage points to 9.5 percent. But that also means that the original projections from President Obama’s economic advisers on what would happen with and without the stimulus plan are still off — and significantly so.
In mid-June, we wrote about the large discrepancy between the jobs that actually have been lost and what administration economists had predicted in January.

July 1, 2009

Hurricane Mitch hit Honduras in 1998, killing 5,600 people and causing $2 billion in damage.
Source: CIA World Factbook

The Long-Term View

As part of his ongoing health-care-overhaul tour, President Barack Obama held a town hall event July 1 in Annandale, Va. Among the president’s messages: Medicare and Medicaid spending are getting out of control. And he’s right.
Obama said: “And for those who rightly worry about deficits, the amount our government spends on Medicare and Medicaid will eventually grow larger than what our government spends today on everything else combined,” adding that a recent Congressional Budget Office study showed that “when you look at the rising costs of entitlement,

Veteran Visit

Q: Was Obama rude to wounded veterans during a visit to the National Naval Medical Center?
A: A chain e-mail that makes such a claim gets several facts wrong and is disputed by an official who was present at the meeting.