One year ago today the Democrats forced a huge, bloated, pork-barrel spending bill through Congress that they called an “economic stimulus.” When the legislation was conceived they thought it would sail through with 75 or 80 votes in the U.S. Senate. Instead the American people rose up, took to the streets, and protested. President Obama went back out on the campaign trail and spent his then-considerable political capital to get his stimulus bill passed.

In the end, the Democratic Congress, aided by three Republicans–Olympia Snowe and Susan Collins of Maine and the now-former Republican Arlen Specter, squeaked through a bill hated by the American people. President Obama and Congressional Democrats claimed their bill would save our economy. A year later the verdict is clear: Obama and the Democrats were wrong, and the American people were right.

Many of the claimed jobs “created or saved” (an inherently dishonest construct, since no matter how bad the employment situation is you can always claim to have saved it from being even worse still) were in fictitious congressional districts, and reports of fraud and abuse are piling up. While the White House claims a different inflated number of “jobs created or saved” or now simply points to “jobs funded” just about every day, the overall numbers tell the story. When President Obama signed the bill, the unemployment rate was at 7.6 percent, and the president promised it would never go above 8 percent. Instead we’ve spent much of the past year with unemployment hovering above 10 percent. The current rate sits just below that level at 9.7 percent.

Retiring Democratic Senator Evan Bayh spoke the plain truth on Monday when he said: “If I could create one job in the private sector by helping to grow a business, that would be one more than Congress has created in the last six months.”

FOR CONTINUATION OF THIS ARTICLE, CLICK THIS LINK FOR FOX NEWS: FOXNews.com – Please, Mr. President, No More Stimulus!.

We now know why the White House leaked word of a three-year spending freeze on a few domestic accounts before this extravaganza was released. No one would have noticed such a slushy promise amid this glacier of spending. The budget reveals that overall federal outlays will reach $3.72 trillion in fiscal 2010, and keep rising to $3.834 trillion in 2011.

As a share of the economy, outlays will reach a post-World War II record of 25.4% this year. This is a new modern spending landmark, up from 21% of GDP as recently as fiscal 2008, and far above the 40-year average of 20.7%.

FOR CONTINUATION OF THIS ARTICLE, CLICK THIS LINK FOR THE WALL STREET JOURNAL: The President’s Budget Plan – WSJ.com.

In less than a year, Wall Street was back. The five largest remaining banks are today larger, their executives and traders richer, their strategies of placing large bets with other people’s money no less bold than before the meltdown. The possibility of new regulations emanating from Congress has barely inhibited the Street’s exuberance.

But if Wall Street is back on top, the everyday lives of large numbers of Americans continue to be subject to overwhelming trauma, chaos and disruption.

It is commonplace among policymakers to fervently and sincerely believe that Wall Street’s financial health is not only a precondition for a prosperous real economy but that when the former thrives, the latter will necessarily follow. Few fictions of modern economic life are more assiduously defended than the central importance of the Street to the well-being of the rest of us, as has been proved in 2009.

FOR CONTINUATION OF THIS ARTICLE, CLICK THIS LINK FOR THE HUFFINGTON POST: Robert Reich: 2009: The Year Wall Street Bounced Back and Main Street Got Shafted.

Why the elderly are right to worry when the government rations medical care.

Elderly Americans are turning out in droves to fight ObamaCare, and President Obama is arguing back that they have nothing to worry about. Allow us to referee. While claims about euthanasia and “death panels” are over the top, senior fears have exposed a fundamental truth about what Mr. Obama is proposing: Namely, once health care is nationalized, or mostly nationalized, rationing care is inevitable, and those who have lived the longest will find their care the most restricted.

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Far from being a scare tactic, this is a logical conclusion based on experience and common-sense. Once health care is a “free good” that government pays for, demand will soar and government costs will soar too. When the public finally reaches its taxing limit, something will have to give on the care and spending side. In a word, care will be rationed by politics.

Mr. Obama’s reply is that private insurance companies already ration, by deciding which treatments are covered and which aren’t. However, there’s an ocean of difference between coverage decisions made under millions of voluntary private contracts and rationing via government. An Atlantic Ocean, in fact. Virtually every European government with “universal” health care restricts access in one way or another to control costs, and it isn’t pretty.

The British system is most restrictive, using a black-box actuarial formula known as “quality-adjusted life years,” or QALYs, that determines who can receive what care. If a treatment isn’t deemed to be cost-effective for specific populations, particularly the elderly, the National Health Service simply doesn’t pay for it. Even France—which has a mix of public and private medicine—has fixed reimbursement rates since the 1970s and strictly controls the use of specialists and the introduction of new medical technologies such as CT scans and MRIs.

Yes, the U.S. “rations” by ability to pay (though in the end no one is denied actual care). This is true of every good or service in a free economy and a world of finite resources but infinite wants. Yet no one would say we “ration” houses or gasoline because those goods are allocated by prices. The problem is that governments ration through brute force—either explicitly restricting the use of medicine or lowering payments below market rates. Both methods lead to waiting lines, lower quality, or less innovation—and usually all three.

A lot of talk has centered on what Sarah Palin inelegantly called “death panels.” Of course rationing to save the federal fisc will be subtler than a bureaucratic decision to “pull the plug on grandma,” as Mr. Obama put it. But Mrs. Palin has also exposed a basic truth. A substantial portion of Medicare spending is incurred in the last six months of life.

From the point of view of politicians with a limited budget, is it worth spending a lot on, say, a patient with late-stage cancer where the odds of remission are long? Or should they spend to improve quality, not length, of life? Or pay for a hip or knee replacement for seniors, when palliative care might cost less? And who decides?

In Britain, the NHS decides, and under its QALYs metric it generally won’t pay more than $22,000 for treatments to extend a life six months. “Money for the NHS isn’t limitless,” as one NHS official recently put it in response to American criticism, “so we need to make sure the money we have goes on things which offer more than the care we’ll have to forgo to pay for them.”

Before he got defensive, Mr. Obama was open about this political calculation. He often invokes the experience of his own grandmother, musing whether it was wise for her to receive a hip replacement after a terminal cancer diagnosis. In an April interview with the New York Times, he wondered whether this represented a “sustainable model” for society. He seems to believe these medical issues are all justifiably political questions that government or some panel of philosopher kings can and should decide. No wonder so many seniors rebel at such judgments that they know they could do little to influence, much less change.

Mr. Obama has also said many times that the growth of Medicare spending must be restrained, and his budget director Peter Orszag has made it nearly his life’s cause. We agree, but then why does Mr. Obama want to add to our fiscal burdens a new Medicare-like program for everyone under 65 too? Medicare already rations care, refusing, for example, to pay for virtual colonsocopies and has payment policies or directives to curtail the use of certain cancer drugs, diagnostic tools, asthma medications and many others. Seniors routinely buy supplemental insurance (Medigap) to patch Medicare’s holes—and Medicare is still growing by 11% this year.

The political and fiscal pressure to further ration Medicare would increase exponentially if government is paying for most everyone’s care. The better way to slow the growth of Medicare is to give seniors more control over their own health care and the incentives to spend wisely, by offering competitive insurance plans. But this would mean less control for government, not more.

It’s striking that even the AARP—which is run by liberals who favor national health care—has been backing away from support for Mr. Obama’s version. The AARP leadership’s Democratic sympathies will probably prevail in the end, perhaps after some price-control sweeteners are added for prescription drugs. But AARP is out of touch with its own members, who have figured out that their own health and lives are at stake in this debate over ObamaCare. They know that when medical discretion clashes with limited government budgets, medicine loses.

CLICK THIS LINK FOR THE WALL STREET JOURNAL, AMERICA’S #1 FINANCIAL NEWS LEADER: ObamaCare Will Lead to Rationed Care for Elderly – WSJ.com.

EDITOR’S NOTE: Before you read this op-ed, keep in mind POTUS ran as an anti-war candidate and the ‘mantra’ he would ‘change’ the way Washington thinks.

Are there not other alternatives than sending our armies to chew barbed wire in Flanders?” During the bitter winter of 1914-15, the first lord of the Admiralty posed this urgent question to Britain’s prime minister.

The eighth anniversary of 9/11, now fast approaching, invites attention to a similar question: Are there not other alternatives than sending our armies to choke on the dust of Iraq and Afghanistan?

FOR CONTINUATION OF THIS STORY, CLICK THE LINK TO THE LOS ANGELES TIMES: Obama’s strategic blind spot – Los Angeles Times.

At that point, a scrupulous radio host had three options: (A) hit the kill button (B) laugh and hit the kill button or (C) offer some push-back against the fantastical notion that Barack Obama was born on foreign soil and thus serves — illegally — as the Oval Office’s first resident alien.

Instead, Dobbs chose the maximum complicity-minimum integrity route, or (D): “Certainly your view can’t be discounted,” the host said.

So it went over the last week, with the bloviating interviewer offering the (nominal) credibility of his syndicated radio show, which airs on dozens of stations, and the CNN television brand as a platform for assorted wing nuts, whose conspiracy fulminations about Obamahad previously been most virulent in the more disreputable reaches of the Internet.

The subject fits neatly with Dobbs’ nativist, immigrant obsession. And the cable demagogue, already well behind Fox News, has got to find some way to keep from sagging behind even traditional cable television laggard MSNBC.

Cooler heads at CNN put some distance between themselves and their once star host, with fill-in Kitty Pilgrim using a segment of “Lou Dobbs Tonight” on Friday to provide a substantially more skeptical look at the Obama-made-in-Africa claims.

Pilgrim introduced the topic of Obama’s alleged foreign birth as she sat in for Dobbs that night, calling it “the discredited rumor that won’t go away.”

“CNN has fully investigated the issue,” the substitute said, and “found no basis for the questions about the president’s birthplace.”

When the issue first surfaced in the presidential campaign last summer, numerous credible news organizations and even the Hawaii Department of Health presented clear evidence that Obama was born Aug. 4, 1961, in Honolulu.

But those reports have done little to snuff out elaborate and ever-mutating conspiracy theories.

I often hear from disgruntled readers that they don’t pay attention to the dread “Mainstream Media” because they can find “the truth” on the Internet. Translation: Some blogger will please them by propping up just about any cockeyed theory that they hold.

The Internet agitators, in turn, get support and sustenance from mainstream provocateurs like Sean Hannity and Rush Limbaugh, who last month chortled, “God does not have a birth certificate, and neither does Obama — not that we’ve seen.”

Dobbs and the others found a nominal “news” peg for the story last week when the U.S. Army allowed a reserve major, Stefan F. Cook, to reverse his voluntary deployment to Afghanistan. Cook proclaimed his orders invalid because, he insisted, his commander in chief wasn’t born in the U.S.

Never mind that the good major appears in this instance to be more agent provocateur than man of arms or that he is represented by Orly Taitz, an Orange County attorney (and dentist) who has made it her life’s work to prove Obama isn’t one of us.

Dobbs welcomed Taitz and another of her clients, Alan Keyes (who was crushed by Obama in their Illinois U.S. Senate race), to his radio program like seers instead of extreme partisans. Dobbs suggested he had reached no conclusions, before barreling ahead with questions about why Obama hasn’t produced “his birth certificate, the long form, the real deal.”

But Obama has presented his birth certificate, as first noted by the nonpartisan FactCheck.org in June of last year.

Rather than settling the matter, though, the Internet display of the “Certification of Live Birth” provoked the first in what has become an endless cycle of challenges and innuendo.

Just last month, the Hawaii Department of Health confirmed to the Honolulu Star-Bulletin that the document is the only official record of the president’s birth and proves he was born in that state.

But conspiracy theorists argue that the lack of an underlying paper document (the so-called long-form birth certificate) proves a cover-up.

That ignores multiple truths including this one: Hawaii’s records, like those in many states, have gone electronic, and the certification document is accepted by both the state and national government as full proof of citizenship. To insist otherwise is to embrace the notion that thousands upon thousands of Hawaiians have obtained their U.S. passports, using similar documents, fraudulently.

FOR CONTINUATION OF THIS STORY, NEWS & INFORMATION, CLICK THE FOLLOWING LINK:   Lou Dobbs and the canard over President Obama’s birth – Los Angeles Times.

OPINION BY:  James Rainey for the Los Angeles Times.

WE LOOK FORWARD TO YOUR FEEDBACK ON THIS STORY

They brought in pollsters to their party conferences to persuade their members that the country was fervently behind them. They were supported by their interest groups and cheered on by their activists and the partisan press. They spent federal money in an effort to buy support but ended up disgusting the country instead.

It’s not that interesting to watch the Democrats lose touch with America. That’s because the plotline is exactly the same. The party is led by insular liberals from big cities and the coasts, who neither understand nor sympathize with moderates. They have their own cherry-picking pollsters, their own media and activist cocoon, their own plans to lavishly spend borrowed money to buy votes.

This ideological overreach won’t be any more successful than the last one. A Washington Post-ABC News poll released Monday confirms what other polls have found. Most Americans love Barack Obama personally, but support for Democratic policies is already sliding fast.

Approval of Obama’s handling of health care, for example, has slid from 57 percent to 49 percent since April. Disapproval has risen from 29 percent to 44 percent. As recently as June, voters earning more than $50,000 preferred Obama to the Republicans on health care by a 21-point margin. Now those voters are evenly split.

Most independents now disapprove of Obama’s health care strategy. In March, only 32 percent of Americans thought Obama was an old-style, tax-and-spend liberal. Now 43 percent do.

We’re only in the early stages of the liberal suicide march, but there already have been three phases. First, there was the stimulus package. You would have thought that a stimulus package would be designed to fight unemployment and stimulate the economy during a recession. But Congressional Democrats used it as a pretext to pay for $787 billion worth of pet programs with borrowed money. Only 11 percent of the money will be spent by the end of the fiscal year — a triumph of ideology over pragmatism.

Then there is the budget. Instead of allaying moderate anxieties about the deficits, the budget is expected to increase the government debt by $11 trillion between 2009 and 2019.

Finally, there is health care. Every cliché Ann Coulter throws at the Democrats is gloriously fulfilled by the Democratic health care bills. The bills do almost nothing to control health care inflation. They are modeled on the Massachusetts health reform law that is currently coming apart at the seams precisely because it doesn’t control costs. They do little to reward efficient providers and reform inefficient ones.

The House bill adds $239 billion to the federal deficit during the first 10 years, according to the Congressional Budget Office. It would pummel small businesses with an 8 percent payroll penalty. It would jack America’s top tax rate above those in Italy and France. Top earners in New York and California would be giving more than 55 percent of earnings to one government entity or another.

Nancy Pelosi has lower approval ratings than Dick Cheney and far lower approval ratings than Sarah Palin. And yet Democrats have allowed her policy values to carry the day — this in an era in which independents dominate the electoral landscape.

Who’s going to stop this leftward surge? Months ago, it seemed as if Obama would lead a center-left coalition. Instead, he has deferred to the Old Bulls on Capitol Hill on issue after issue.

Machiavelli said a leader should be feared as well as loved. Obama is loved by the Democratic chairmen, but he is not feared. On health care, Obama has emphasized cost control. The chairmen flouted his priorities because they don’t fear him. On cap and trade, Obama campaigned against giving away pollution offsets. The chairmen wrote their bill to do precisely that because they don’t fear him. On taxes, Obama promised that top tax rates would not go above Clinton-era levels. The chairmen flouted that promise because they don’t fear him.

Last week, the administration announced a proposal to take Medicare spending decisions away from Congress and lodge the power with technocrats in the executive branch. It’s a good idea, and it might lead to real cost savings. But there’s no reason to think that it will be incorporated into the final law. The chairmen will never surrender power to an administration they can override.

That leaves matters in the hands of the Blue Dog Democrats. These brave moderates are trying to restrain the fiscal explosion. But moderates inherently lack seniority (they are from swing districts). They are usually bought off by leadership at the end of the day.

And so here we are again. Every new majority overinterprets its mandate. We’ve been here before. We’ll be here again.

FOR MORE NEWS AND INFORMATION – CLICK THE LINK FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES:  Op-Ed Columnist – Liberal Suicide March – NYTimes.com.

FEEDBACK:  Do you agree with Mr. Brooks?  We look forward to your opinion.

In 1993 and 1994, Hillary Clinton’s health-care reform proposal failed because it was concocted in secret without the guiding hand of public consensus-building, and because it was a philosophical over-reach. Today President Barack Obama is repeating these mistakes.

The reason is plain: The left in Washington has concluded that honesty will not yield its desired policy result. So it resorts to a fundamentally dishonest approach to reform. I say this because the marketing of the Democrats’ plans as presented in the House of Representatives and endorsed heartily by President Obama rests on three falsehoods.

First, Mr. Obama doggedly promises that if you like your (private) health-care coverage now, you can keep it. That promise is hollow, because the Democrats’ reforms are designed to push an ever-increasing number of Americans into a government-run health-care plan.

If a so-called public option is part of health-care reform, the Lewin Group study estimates over 100 million Americans may leave private plans for government-run health care. Any government plan will benefit from taxpayer subsidies and be able to operate at a financial loss—competing unfairly in the marketplace until private plans are driven out of business. The government plan will become so large that it will set, rather than negotiate, prices. This will inevitably lead to monopoly, with a resulting threat to the quality of our health care.

Second, the Democrats disingenuously argue their reforms will not diminish the quality of our health care even as government involvement in the delivery of that health care increases massively. For all of us who have seen the Federal Emergency Management Agency’s response to hurricanes, this contention is laughable on its face. When government bureaucracies drive the delivery of services—in this case inserting themselves between health-care providers and their patients—quality degradation will surely come. House Democrats seem willing to accept that problem to achieve their philosophical aim—the long-term removal of for-profit entities from the health-care landscape.

Third, Mr. Obama’s rhetoric paints a picture of a massive new benefit that will actually cost average Americans less than what they pay today. The Democrats want middle-class taxpayers to believe they won’t feel the pinch of this initiative, even as their employers are assessed massive new taxes. They might as well try to argue that up is down. The analysis of the Democrats’ proposal by the Congressional Budget Office shows that it will not reduce government spending on health care, and that it will substantially increase the federal deficit—and this despite all the tax increases.

I served in the U.S. House with a majority of the current 435 representatives, and I am confident that if given the proper amount of legislative review, they will not accept the flawed Pelosi plan that is currently stuck in committee. Yet there is general agreement among Republicans and Democrats that we need health-care reform to bring costs down. This agreement can be the basis of a genuine, bipartisan reform, once the current over-reach by Mr. Obama and Mrs. Pelosi fails. Leaders of both parties can then come together behind health-care reform that stresses these seven principles:

•Consumer choice guided by transparency. We need a system where individuals choose an integrated plan that adopts the best disease-management practices, as opposed to fragmented care. Pricing and outcomes data for all tests, treatments and procedures should be posted on the Internet. Portable electronic health-care records can reduce paperwork, duplication and errors, while also empowering consumers to seek the provider that best meets their needs.

•Aligned consumer interests. Consumers should be financially invested in better health decisions through health-savings accounts, lower premiums and reduced cost sharing. If they seek care in cost-effective settings, comply with medical regimens, preventative care, and lifestyles that reduce the likelihood of chronic disease, they should share in the savings.

•Medical lawsuit reform. The practice of defensive medicine costs an estimated $100 billion-plus each year, according to the American Academy of Orthopaedic Surgeons, which used a study by economists Daniel P. Kessler and Mark B. McClellan. No health reform is serious about reducing costs unless it reduces the costs of frivolous lawsuits.

•Insurance reform. Congress should establish simple guidelines to make policies more portable, with more coverage for pre-existing conditions. Reinsurance, high-risk pools, and other mechanisms can reduce the dangers of adverse risk selection and the incentive to avoid covering the sick. Individuals should also be able to keep insurance as they change jobs or states.

•Pooling for small businesses, the self-employed, and others. All consumers should have equal opportunity to buy the lowest-cost, highest-quality insurance available. Individuals should benefit from the economies of scale currently available to those working for large employers. They should be free to purchase their health coverage without tax penalty through their employer, church, union, etc.

•Pay for performance, not activity. Roughly 75% of health-care spending is for the care of chronic conditions such as heart disease, cancer and diabetes—and there is little coordination of this care. We can save money and improve outcomes by using integrated networks of care with rigorous, transparent outcome measures emphasizing prevention and disease management.

•Refundable tax credits. Low-income working Americans without health insurance should get help in buying private coverage through a refundable tax credit. This is preferable to building a separate, government-run health-care plan.

These steps would bring down health-care costs. They would not bankrupt our nation or increase taxes in the midst of a recession. They are achievable reforms with bipartisan consensus and public support. All they require is a willingness by the president to slow down and have an honest discussion with Americans about the real downstream consequences of his ideas. Let’s start there.

For continuation of this story, news and information, click the following link for the Wall Street Journal:  Bobby Jindal’s Bipartisan Health-Care Reform – WSJ.com.

Mr. Jindal is the governor of Louisiana

Can Barack Obama talk his way onto Mount Rushmore? He might. In fact, if just half of what Mr. Obama has said that he, we or the world should do comes to pass, he’s going straight to that mountain.

More than any U.S. president, The Speech is the primary vehicle of Barack Obama’s politics. Web sites have been erected as shrines to his speeches. Obamaspeech.com offers the text of 100 Obama speeches back to 2002. The electronic library stops at January 2009, when the White House site takes over. Currently it’s up to 36 pages listing the titles alone of the president’s remarks and speeches.

Six months into his presidency, with more surely to come, it is an appropriate moment to ask: What is the point and purpose of Barack Obama’s speeches?

One answer — offered by students of talk from Aristotle through Alfred North Whitehead — is obvious: The purpose of the rhetorician’s art is to persuade. John Locke, watching democracy’s advance, had a darker view; rhetoric, said Locke, is an instrument of error and deceit. Or both: talking people into error.

In our time, public remarks remain first of all a photo-op to make a president glow in public. Mr. Obama is taking it to another level, making the public speech the central act of his presidency.

On his just-completed foreign trip, he gave a major address in Moscow reinterpreting the Cold War and another in Ghana laying out a persuasive path to prosperity for the African continent. In June he gave a major speech on Islam’s place in history and its relationship to the rest of the world, spoke the next day at length on the meaning of Buchenwald and a day later about D-Day at Normandy. He seems to be on TV every day, talking.

The first thing to be said about this body of work is that it is astonishingly good. Even by the something-for-everyone standards of political speech, much of Mr. Obama’s somethings are strong and worth hearing.

Here’s the problem: Mr. Obama is not the nation’s Speaker in Chief. He’s not a senator, and he’s no longer a candidate. He’s the president. A president’s major speeches are different than those of anyone else. That high office imposes demands beyond the power of a podium. Inspiration matters, but the office also requires acts of leadership. A U.S. president’s words must be connected to something beyond sentiment and eloquence. Too much of the time, Barack Obama’s big speeches don’t seem to be connected to anything other than his own interesting thoughts on some subject.

Lincoln’s eloquence flowed from the pain of the Civil War. Washington’s Farewell Address, perhaps America’s greatest political speech, was a magisterial summing up after leading an army to victory in the Revolution and then the nation’s beginning. FDR’s remembered speeches were pushed into life by the Depression and then world war.

Ronald Reagan’s great “tear down this wall” speech in 1987 at the Brandenburg Gate was just one piece in an elaborate Cold War endgame strategy.

LBJ’s most famous speech, to a full session of Congress in 1965 a week after the violent civil-rights march in Selma, wasn’t just a reflection on civil rights in America but itself a central event.

With one notable exception — health care — there is a disconnect between the scale of Mr. Obama’s ideas and his actions, and sometimes even reality, as when he says a U.S-Russian commitment to a world without nuclear weapons would be the “legal and moral foundation” for persuading the world’s rogues to do the same. What, exactly, comes after the moral foundation?

The Russian “reset” isn’t a foreign-policy statement; it’s a sentiment. If you were the head of an Islamic nation, what policy conclusion were you supposed to take from that Cairo speech? All past administrations have been willing to talk to adversaries. When he speaks as president, Mr. Obama’s audiences have reason to expect that some concrete actions or policies will flow from seemingly major statements. Other than more diplomats talking, I don’t think much of anything is going to follow these. The Speech was pretty much it.

Then there is health care. With characteristic eloquence, Mr. Obama defended his federal health-insurance entitlement for the middle class in a major speech to the American Medical Association. If enacted, Mr. Obama’s plan would be the most significant piece of social entitlement legislation since 1965, the year Medicare and Medicaid were enacted as the cornerstone of the Great Society.

It may well be that this in fact is the foundation on which Barack Obama intends to build his own vast social vision. If so he will be doing it with no real event or trauma to drive a policy of this scale — no war, no civil-rights movement. Instead, he is trying to shape a presidency from the force of his own political personality carved out of a mountain of random eloquence. It might work, too.

Originally filed for the Wall Street Journal.  For more news and information, click the following link:  Daniel Henninger: Obama and the Speech – WSJ.com.

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The recent unemployment numbers have undermined confidence that we might be nearing the bottom of the recession. What we can see on the surface is disconcerting enough, but the inside numbers are just as bad.

The Bureau of Labor Statistics preliminary estimate for job losses for June is 467,000, which means 7.2 million people have lost their jobs since the start of the recession. The cumulative job losses over the last six months have been greater than for any other half year period since World War II, including the military demobilization after the war. The job losses are also now equal to the net job gains over the previous nine years, making this the only recession since the Great Depression to wipe out all job growth from the previous expansion.

Here are 10 reasons we are in even more trouble than the 9.5% unemployment rate indicates:

- June’s total assumed 185,000 people at work who probably were not. The government could not identify them; it made an assumption about trends. But many of the mythical jobs are in industries that have absolutely no job creation, e.g., finance. When the official numbers are adjusted over the next several months, June will look worse.

- More companies are asking employees to take unpaid leave. These people don’t count on the unemployment roll.

- No fewer than 1.4 million people wanted or were available for work in the last 12 months but were not counted. Why? Because they hadn’t searched for work in the four weeks preceding the survey.

- The number of workers taking part-time jobs due to the slack economy, a kind of stealth underemployment, has doubled in this recession to about nine million, or 5.8% of the work force. Add those whose hours have been cut to those who cannot find a full-time job and the total unemployed rises to 16.5%, putting the number of involuntarily idle in the range of 25 million.

- The average work week for rank-and-file employees in the private sector, roughly 80% of the work force, slipped to 33 hours. That’s 48 minutes a week less than before the recession began, the lowest level since the government began tracking such data 45 years ago. Full-time workers are being downgraded to part time as businesses slash labor costs to remain above water, and factories are operating at only 65% of capacity. If Americans were still clocking those extra 48 minutes a week now, the same aggregate amount of work would get done with 3.3 million fewer employees, which means that if it were not for the shorter work week the jobless rate would be 11.7%, not 9.5% (which far exceeds the 8% rate projected by the Obama administration).

- The average length of official unemployment increased to 24.5 weeks, the longest since government began tracking this data in 1948. The number of long-term unemployed (i.e., for 27 weeks or more) has now jumped to 4.4 million, an all-time high.

- The average worker saw no wage gains in June, with average compensation running flat at $18.53 an hour.

- The goods producing sector is losing the most jobs — 223,000 in the last report alone.

- The prospects for job creation are equally distressing. The likelihood is that when economic activity picks up, employers will first choose to increase hours for existing workers and bring part-time workers back to full time. Many unemployed workers looking for jobs once the recovery begins will discover that jobs as good as the ones they lost are almost impossible to find because many layoffs have been permanent. Instead of shrinking operations, companies have shut down whole business units or made sweeping structural changes in the way they conduct business. General Motors and Chrysler, closed hundreds of dealerships and reduced brands. Citigroup and Bank of America cut tens of thousands of positions and exited many parts of the world of finance.

Job losses may last well into 2010 to hit an unemployment peak close to 11%. That unemployment rate may be sustained for an extended period.

Can we find comfort in the fact that employment has long been considered a lagging indicator? It is conventionally seen as having limited predictive power since employment reflects decisions taken earlier in the business cycle. But today is different. Unemployment has doubled to 9.5% from 4.8% in only 16 months, a rate so fast it may influence future economic behavior and outlook.

How could this happen when Washington has thrown trillions of dollars into the pot, including the famous $787 billion in stimulus spending that was supposed to yield $1.50 in growth for every dollar spent? For a start, too much of the money went to transfer payments such as Medicaid, jobless benefits and the like that do nothing for jobs and growth. The spending that creates new jobs is new spending, particularly on infrastructure. It amounts to less than 10% of the stimulus package today.

About 40% of U.S. workers believe the recession will continue for another full year, and their pessimism is justified. As paychecks shrink and disappear, consumers are more hesitant to spend and won’t lead the economy out of the doldrums quickly enough.

It may have made him unpopular in parts of the Obama administration, but Vice President Joe Biden was right when he said a week ago that the administration misread how bad the economy was and how effective the stimulus would be. It was supposed to be about jobs but it wasn’t. The Recovery Act was a single piece of legislation but it included thousands of funding schemes for tens of thousands of projects, and those programs are stuck in the bureaucracy as the government releases the funds with typical inefficiency.

Another $150 billion, which was allocated to state coffers to continue programs like Medicaid, did not add new jobs; hundreds of billions were set aside for tax cuts and for new benefits for the poor and the unemployed, and they did not add new jobs. Now state budgets are drowning in red ink as jobless claims and Medicaid bills climb.

Next year state budgets will have depleted their initial rescue dollars. Absent another rescue plan, they will have no choice but to slash spending, raise taxes, or both. State and local governments, representing about 15% of the economy, are beginning the worst contraction in postwar history amid a deficit of $166 billion for fiscal 2010, according to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, and a gap of $350 billion in fiscal 2011.

Households overburdened with historic levels of debt will also be saving more. The savings rate has already jumped to almost 7% of after-tax income from 0% in 2007, and it is still going up. Every dollar of saving comes out of consumption. Since consumer spending is the economy’s main driver, we are going to have a weak consumer sector and many businesses simply won’t have the means or the need to hire employees. After the 1990-91 recessions, consumers went out and bought houses, cars and other expensive goods. This time, the combination of a weak job picture and a severe credit crunch means that people won’t be able to get the financing for big expenditures, and those who can borrow will be reluctant to do so. The paycheck has returned as the primary source of spending.

This process is nowhere near complete and, until it is, the economy will barely grow if it does at all, and it may well oscillate between sluggish growth and modest decline for the next several years until the rebalancing of excessive debt has been completed. Until then, the economy will be deprived of adequate profits and cash flow, and businesses will not start to hire nor race to make capital expenditures when they have vast idle capacity.

No wonder poll after poll shows a steady erosion of confidence in the stimulus. So what kind of second-act stimulus should we look for? Something that might have a real multiplier effect, not a congressional wish list of pet programs. It is critical that the Obama administration not play politics with the issue. The time to get ready for a serious infrastructure program is now. It’s a shame Washington didn’t get it right the first time.

Mr. Zuckerman is chairman and editor in chief of U.S. News & World Report.

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