According to Bloomberg, Ben Bernanke and the Federal Reserve have pledged “to keep the main interest rate near zero for an “extended period” and confirmed that emergency measures to prop up the housing market will end as planned this month.”

The most frightening element of this ten-year forecast is that an estimated $5.6 trillion of the debt would be interest expense. Yes, that’s right, interest.

Perhaps losing 36,000 jobs is better than expected, or even a sign of a recovery (which I doubt), but at best it’s a sign that things aren’t as bad as they were, not good news.

If you didn’t think there was a wink and a nod relationship between large banks and the feds, the “Volcker Rule” should serve as an acknowledgment. Because lending and credit is so crucial to the economy, financial institutions know the government will backstop them during crisis mode in the industry.

Chris Edwards of the Cato Institute took a little trip back in time to check the government’s budget accuracy… they get an F minus. As Walter Williams points out here, this is nothing new, but in 2001, the Bush Administration forecasted that by 2010, the Federal government would have a $2.71 trillion dollar budget. According to Obama’s budget estimate, it will be $3.83 trillion dollars! The following chart shows the real budget vs. the forecast.

What’s disheartening is the American health care system desperately needs reform, but first we’d have to stop the wrong reforms being proposed before actually fixing the system. It’s a long road ahead.

In terms of private sector experience, the cupboard is bare within President Obama’s Cabinet. Take the following graphic with a grain of salt. It came from a recent JP Morgan report in which I cannot vouch for the author’s research practices, or ideology. The author took all presidential administrations since 1900, looking at the private sector experience of 432 Cabinet secretaries whose activities touch most on the private sector. Here are the findings:

Brilliant:

Here’s the problem: the United States has lost approximately 3.3 million jobs since the stimulus package was passed. Unemployment has risen from 7.6% to over 10%. Furthermore, if you include people who are underemployed (working part-time even though they’d prefer to work full-time) or have simply given up on finding a job, unemployment is closer to 20%. So how, exactly, does Obama know he’s saved 640,000 or a million jobs or whatever it is? The exact methodology is difficult to ascertain, but the best explanation I can come up with is an extremely creative imagination.

As the jobless recovery rhetoric continues by the federal government, many have braced for October unemployment figures in the double digits. The Department of Labor released the latest unemployment data today, confirming those double digit concerns. U.S. unemployment hit 10.2% in October, up from 9.8% in September, the highest since April 1983.