Unemployment Reaches Double Digits

When I read this headline, I thought I was in Europe because this type of news is the norm for Europe, but I confirmed it--unemployment reached 10.2%.What makes that number more shocking is when you throw in underemployment, it comes to a whopping 17.5%!  As of date, the the government claims to have saved/created 640,329 jobs.  My first issue with that is that a HUGE amount of those jobs are coming from the Census Bureau, all of which are temporary jobs.  When CNN starts questioning the nature of stimulus jobs, it even has to make me wonder of Obama's effectiveness.  The whole hype behind Obama's need to capriciously pass the stimulus package earlier was so that unemployment wouldn't rise beyond 8%.  Instead, we're seeing a rate of unemployment we haven't seen since the early eighties, not to mention an incompetent man leading the most powerful country in the world who doesn't know the first thing about job creation.  A government stimulus package cannot create more jobs than the free market; it always creates less.  This was something I learned when I took Macroeconomics back in high school.  In the most ideal situation, the government would create a multiplier effect of one, but since the government has to maintain a huge bureaucracy to manage everything, the multiplier effect becomes less. Let the markets be free!  We should have learned this from the days of James Earl Carter, but I guess George Satanaya was right when he said that history is doomed to repeat itself from those who don't learn from it.