BLITZER: Joining us now from the White House, the chairman of the president's Council of Economic Advisers, Austan Goolsbee.

Austan, thanks very much for coming in.

AUSTAN GOOLSBEE, WHITE HOUSE ECONOMIC ADVISER: Thanks for having me again, Wolf.

BLITZER: The numbers, as you well know, are not very good. What happened?

GOOLSBEE: Well, you know, as I said, last month, when it was 100,000 plus above expectations and I'll say again now, don't ever make too much out of any one month's number. What happened is, we had some headwinds coming from gas prices, coming from the events in Japan, some of the events in Europe, slowed the growth rate a bit, and that did slow down the job creation.

But the overall trend, which is a more accurate barometer of how the labor market is doing than any one month report, shows that, you know, the last six months we added 1 million jobs in the private sector. So, I think we are charged. We've got to get the growth rate going higher and we've got to get the job engine revved back up.

BLITZER: All right. So are there specific ways to do that? Do you have any new initiatives that you're planning as a result of the not so good numbers from last month?

GOOLSBEE: Well, look, as I say, you don't want to conclude anything about trends from one month's job report. Just like last month's report was excellent and well above expectations, that doesn't -- you don't want to adjust the policy on a month-by-month basis.

The things that the president did in December which have been contributing to the economy for the first five months and will contribute for the rest of 2011, the business tax incentives and the payroll tax cut for 150 million workers, those are really important, and I think if we hadn't had that, the impact of some of these headwinds would have been substantially worse than they have been. I think you've seen the president is carrying out this regulatory look back where he's asked the 20 big agencies to come back with plans to eliminate outdated regulations, to streamline regulations that are too costly.

I think that's trying to improve the investment climate so business might have more of an incentive to invest here. But the overriding thing is that we shifted from a circumstance of rescue that was in place when the president came into office, where we're losing 780,000 jobs a month, teetering on the edge of depression, in a moment like that government is the driver of recovery. Now we're shifting to the private sector being the driver of recovery. So it's all about incentives.

BLITZER: So no more immediate plans for a new economic stimulus package, a new jobs bill? No more tax cuts, at least not planned right now?

GOOLSBEE: Well, look, it's a fundamental jobs strategy, but the jobs strategy as you're transitioning to recovery is try to help get the private sector to stand up. So the public sector has been subtracting jobs.

BLITZER: Well, is there a new initiative for you to do this to try to help that?

GOOLSBEE: Yes. As I described, we have got tax policy to encourage private investment, we've got the payroll tax cut to give the incentives to workers. We've got the regulatory streamlining, the Startup America, which are about trying to remove barriers for investment.

And I think on the deficit reduction side, the negotiations are going reasonably well. This is not a one-day phenomenon. But the president's view that we ought to have a balanced plan, and that if you have a balanced plan, that will allow you to preserve the investments in education, in research and development, in infrastructure that we need to grow, I think that's also pretty sensible.

BLITZER: One of the leading Republican presidential candidates, Mitt Romney, issued a statement today saying, "Today's unemployment numbers show that we are going backwards, and that is the wrong direction for America. President Obama's policies made the recession worse, and as a result more people are out of work."

You want to respond to Mitt Romney?

GOOLSBEE: Well, look, I'm not going say any personal thing about Mitt Romney. I will say we tried the alternative approach of, let's have high-income tax cuts and let's not try to have broad base growth in the 2000s, and it ended up in the worst recession since 1929.

The president's policies helped pull us out of a tailspin where we're losing 780,000 jobs a month when he takes office. And in the last six months, we've added a million jobs. In the last 15 months, we've added more than two million jobs in the private sector.

We've got to keep going in that direction. You know, this is -- there are going to be stumbles along the way. We've known that. We've got a long way to go, but we've got to continue the upward trajectory that we've had over the last year.

BLITZER: One of your jobs is the forecast. Right now, unemployment, 9.1 percent.

Where do you think it will be a year from now?

GOOLSBEE: You know, we got an official forecast and we update it every six months. So the next update will be in August. We should have substantially more information than we have today just from this one.

In our official forecast that came out with the budget in February, we said by the end of 2012, the unemployment rate would be 8.2 percent, that the unemployment rate would average four 2011, 9.3 percent. Thus far, obviously, it's come in below that, and job creation has been higher than what we forecast at that time. But I don't know what the updates will be by the time we get to August.

BLITZER: You know, no president has ever been elected -- re- elected with a higher than 7.2 percent unemployment rate. So this must be -- since FDR, we are talking about. So this must be a source of deep concern.

GOOLSBEE: Well, look, you're the political expert. I'm just the economic policy guy.

I will say that what we need is to have improvement. I don't know how many times the unemployment rate has been higher than, you know, 8, 9 percent in an election. I know that if we're adding millions of jobs a year, like we did -- in the last 15 months, we added two million jobs in the private sector. That's the direction we've got to be headed. We've got to have a policy that is oriented to growth and, yes, we're going to have some stumbles, we're going to face some headwinds at different times.

But if you look at what the private sector is saying in their forecast, they are still anticipating a rebound for the second half of this year. That comports with what the government forecast says. And that's what we've got to do. The only way out of the hole is to climb your way out, and that's what we've got to do.

BLITZER: Well, good luck. Let's hope you climb out of that hole. A lot of people are looking for jobs, and they need all the help that they can get.

Austan Goolsbee, thanks very much.

GOOLSBEE: Thanks, Wolf.