A visual history of President Obama’s economic policy

If you build it, will they come? (Nikki Kahn/The Washington Post)

This week the White House's Council of Economic Advisers released a report marking the fifth anniversary of the American Recovery and Reconstruction Act -- the  economic stimulus passed at the beginning of President Obama's term. Much criticized by Republicans, the stimulus was one of the most significant pieces of economic policymaking in generations. The CEA report was designed to tout the merits of the stimulus and the follow-up legislation, but it also provides a neat visual history of Obama's response to the economic crisis he confronted when he came into office and the meager recovery he presided over.

This first chart is a good summary of why Obama was perhaps destined to undershoot in his response to the economic crisis he faced. Obama's aides were drawing up plans for the stimulus in the final months of the 2008 campaign. In November and December of that year, professional forecasters had projected real economic growth in the final quarter of 2008 to be as bad as -4.1 percent and, in the first quarter of 2009, to be as bad as -2.4 percent. Meanwhile, they projected the unemployment rate to average as high as 6.7 percent in the final quarter of 2008 and as high as 7.3 percent in the first months of 2009. On all these predictions, they were way off. Actual economic growth in the final quarter of 2008 was -8.3 percent, and in the first quarter of 2009, it was -5.4 percent. Meanwhile, the unemployment rate averaged 8.3 percent in the first quarter of 2009. Obama's aides designed the stimulus for an economy in recession, but they didn't know it would be an all-out catastrophe.

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