EXPIRATION DATE: Reminder: Team Obama said in ’09 stimulus would have unemployment below 6% by 2012.

The report, entitled “The Job Impact of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Plan,” was released on Jan. 9, 2009. It was put out by the office of the president-elect was written by economists Christina Romer and Jared Bernstein. Romer would become chairwoman of the Council of Economic Advisers for President Obama. Bernstein was Vice President Biden’s chief economic advisor.

Page four of the report features a chart projecting the unemployment levels with and without the stimulus. With the stimulus, the Romer and Bernstein predicted that unemployment would never rise past 8 percent, and would peak just under that in the third quarter of 2009 before steadily declining to around 5.6 percent by today. Without the stimulus, they predicted that unemployment would peak around 9 percent in the third quarter of 2010 before declining to around 6 percent today.

The then-Democrat majority Congress passed the $819 billion stimulus bill later that month. The projection turned out to be one of the few things connected to it that was shovel-ready. The unemployment rate reached 10.1 percent in late 2009. It has declined since then but has remained above 8 percent for 41 months straight, a record.

Let’s have that graphic one more time:

Of course, there’s this caveat: “One note: the report assumed that the unemployment rate in the first quarter of 2009 would be 7.5 percent. It was in fact 8.2 percent. Economist Lawrence Lindsey later adjusted their forecast to reflect this and found that it projected unemployment to be about 6.3 percent by this time.”

Well, okay then. Obama defenders sometimes say that, well, Obama didn’t realize how bad the recession was going to be. But that hardly helps. It merely indicates the general problem with central economic planning — the planners never really know what’s going on. The fact is, he spent nearly a trillion dollars on a “stimulus” that was largely wasted (or stolen) and that didn’t deliver anything like the results he promised when selling it. Obama’s stimulus didn’t help, and Obama’s policies in general took a bad situation and made it worse.