The Obama Administration Economic Train Wreck

President Obama is now declining to project where unemployment will go.

President Barack Obama on Tuesday declined to predict how high unemployment will climb but made clear he expects it to keep worsening for a while as hiring lags behind other signs of economic recovery.

"How employment numbers are going to respond is not year clear," the president said on a day when he was headed to Michigan, home of a particularly battered economy. "My expectation is that we will probably continue to see unemployment tick up for several months."

The unemployment rate stands at 9.5 percent, the highest in 26 years.

Obama, addressing reporters in the Oval Office, said the stabilization of the financial markets has allowed banks to start lending again and some small businesses to stay afloat. But he said his administration is aware that the most important factor is whether people are able to get good-paying jobs.

More than 2 million jobs have been lost since Congress passed Obama's $787 billion economic stimulus package. Without that government intervention, Obama said, states like Michigan would be even worse shape because they would have had to lay off more teachers, firefighters and other workers.

His experts have been decidedly wrong to date, and he's not going to estimate where the rate is ultimately going to level out.

It's gotten to the point where he's not even trotting out the tired and completely inane claim of jobs created or saved as a metric, because you can't claim that the porkfest stimulus created jobs when there are millions more on the unemployment rolls than before the stimulus was signed into law.

Let's just say that it's an understatement. Obama's economic team thought unemployment rates would level out at 8.5%. It's now approaching 10% and I fully expect the rates to go well north of that.

Every one of those overly rosy projections by Obama's team has a direct effect on the deficit and government revenues since it means more people will be drawing benefits, and there are fewer people paying in that expected. Every one of his estimates going forward is off as a result; and the numbers look even worse given that the economic growth he was planning for isn't going to come to pass. That means all his rosy budget projections are going to be wrong. The cost? You don't want to know - and the Administration isn't going to go out of its way to say either.