The Obama administration is not exactly optimistic that the nation’s unemployment situation will improve significantly in 2010:

Although President Barack Obama says the multitrillion-dollar spending plan released Monday is designed to get Americans back to work, the administration forecasts 9.8 percent unemployment at the end of this year. That would be down only slightly from the current rate of 10 percent.

The administration’s forecast for job gains is predicting 8.9 percent unemployment at the end of 2011, and 7.9 percent by the end of the following year.

But how realistic are those numbers? Even the current 10 percent unemployment figure is not a true picture of the nation’s unemployment problem, according to a recent Washington Times editorial:

If calculations include Americans who aren’t in the labor force because they stopped looking for work or were forced to take part-time jobs, the unemployment rate has been above 17 percent since September. The Obama administration promised that the incredibly costly stimulus package would keep unemployment down to 8.1 percent, but the result of so much spending has been more job losses – and Americans are angry.

Mr. Obama used the State of the Union to push a second stimulus package. But with massive deficits mounting and stimulus cash going to everything from unknown ZIP codes to $1.57 million to search for fossils in Argentina, it’s painfully obvious that a second stimulus would simply throw more money down the drain. Contrary to Mr. Obama’s bizarre assertion that all economists support his orgiastic spending, basic economic data suggest the stimulus actually increased unemployment and delayed recovery.

The president claimed the first stimulus package already “created or saved” more than half of the 3.5 million jobs it was vowed to rescue. But it’s hard to see where those jobs are when examining the numbers in the Department of Labor’s household survey, which is used to measure the official unemployment rate. The number of people with a job fell by 589,000 in December. On top of that job loss, the number of people no longer in the labor force grew by an astounding 843,000 from November to December.

A recent CNN poll shows that nearly 75 percent of Americans believe that the stimulus money has been wasted. The editors say that the real problem is even worse. The first stimulus actually drove up unemployment and delayed the recovery that many economists were predicting last year. A second stimulus just might be the knockout punch that pushes the economy off its knees and lays it flat on its back.

- JP

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