Today there was more bad news for the long termed unemployed who are still suffering from this supposed Obamanomics recovery.

“More than 1 million people will see their extended unemployment benefits immediately cut off at the end of the month if Congress doesn’t act.”

“An emergency federal benefit program was put in place during the recession to help those who are unemployed longer than six months. That allowed them to get as much as a year and a half of help while they searched for work, even after state benefits ran out.”

“But without congressional action, the program will expire at the end of December, meaning the most anyone could get would be six months of unemployment benefits. In some states, it would be even less.”

Of course Democrats are pulling on our heart strings to continue this benefit but I think Tom Cole, R-Okla said it best (from the NPR article emphasis mine):

“there simply isn’t an appetite for renewing this program again, five years after it started as a temporary emergency measure at the height of the recession.”

This extended benefit was supposed to last only until the Obama promised ‘recovery’ kicked in but 5 years into Obama’s regime has yielded anemic growth and millions still left unemployed for years.

What was Obama’s promise?  Remember back in early 2009 Obama told us that we needed to pass a $787 billion stimulus package to keep the unemployment rate below 8%.  The report from Obama’s crack economic advisors showed us this infamous graph that showed how we needed the 2009 stimulus to keep the unemployment rate below 8%.

I grabbed the monthly U-3 unemployment rate data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics website and superimposed those numbers on the Obama recovery graph and you can see how the $787 billion we spent on the 2009 Recovery Act was totally ineffective on the U-3 unemployment rate.

The actual unemployment rate was WORSE than the predicted unemployment rate if we had not spent the $787 billion on stimulus.  Let that sink in!  Based on the projections of the Team Obama economic whiz kids, we would have been better off to do nothing instead of spending $787 billion on the 2009 stimulus.

This graph tells us either Team Obama:  1) failed to understand the complexities of our economy (in the vein of measure once, cut twice) or 2) proposed solutions that were totally ineffective at recovering from the recession.  Either way this graph shows reveals the incompetence from Team Obama’s team of academic elites.

Five years should be enough for a recovery from a recession but under Obamanomics we see the malaise continues and the 4 million people who are considered long term unemployed have nobody to blame but Team Obama and those who voted for them again in 2012.

Elections have consequences.

h/t to Jim Pethokoukis from the American Enterprise Institute who started plotting actual U-3 unemployment verses the predictions of Team Obama