One has to hope that the Obama administration does not believe its own rhetoric about the supposed success of its fiscal stimulus program in generating new jobs. For while the administration assures us that the fiscal stimulus is generating new jobs according to schedule, the U.S. labor market continues to deteriorate at an alarming rate. Failure to arrest this deterioration threatens to abort the incipient economic recovery and to aggravate an already bleak labor market situation.

The Obama administration would like us to forget how reassuring they were about the U.S. employment outlook at the time that they first unveiled their fiscal stimulus package last February. At that time, they told us that the stimulus would create around 3 million jobs. They also assured us that with...