The Congressional Budget Office projected today that the national unemployment rate will remain above 8 percent until 2014—or until at least a year after the end of the four-year term President Barack Obama won in 2008 and began on Jan. 20, 2009.
“With modest economic growth anticipated for the next few years, CBO expects employment to expand slowly,” says the budget report the CBO released today. “The unemployment rate is projected to fall from 9.1 percent in the second quarter of 2011 to 8.9 percent in the fourth quarter of the year and to 8.5 percent in the fourth quarter of 2012—and then to remain above 8 percent until 2014.”
According to the federal Bureau of Labor Statistics, the last time the national unemployment rate was below 8 percent was in January 2009, the month President Obama was inaugurated. That month it stood at 7.8 percent. By February 2009, the month during which President Obama signed his economic stimulus law, the unemployment rate had risen to 8.2 percent.
If the CBO's projection proves correct, the unemployment rate will have remained above 8 percent for every month of Obama’s four-year term following his signing of the economic stimulus law.
In January 2009, Obama’s top economic advisers predicted that the stimulus would keep unemployment from rising above 8 percent.
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