'This administration is being run like a Junior Achievement project'

So says Peter Morici, a professor at the Maryland's Smith School of Business and the former chief economist at the U.S. International Trade Commission. Morici was interviewed in the context of a CNBC news report helpfully entitled, "In Brutal Job Market, More Than a Million Quit Looking."

If you think the jobs situation has become pretty hopeless, you're not alone. Roughly 1.1 million workers have given up hope of finding employment.

The staggering level of "discouraged workers" as the government calls them has swelled to historic proportions in 2010, past the million barrier for the first time since the Bureau of Labor Statistics has been tracking the number.

It's another Obama Record™!

Though a bit off its all-time high of 1.2 million recorded in February, the metric stands as perhaps the most daunting statistic of last Friday's gloomy jobs report, which showed that almost all the new employment is coming from temporary government Census jobs and not the kind that will sustain an economy.

Could someone forcibly do a Vulcan Mind-Meld with Democrat muckety-mucks to permanently imprint it on their reptilian-level brains? Because they can't seem to get that message.

"If it weren't for the plunge in the labor force, the US unemployment rate would have climbed to 10% in May," Gluskin Sheff chief economist David Rosenberg says in his morning note Monday. "[T]he household survey actually flagged a 35,000 outright decline in employment last month."

Is there something wrong with the BLS statistic when the unemployment rate goes down when more people are actually unemployed?

Apparently not -- if you're a Democrat.

The long-term unemployed-those who haven't worked for at least 27 weeks, or more than half a year-remains mired at 6.8 million, a number that accounts for 46 percent of the total jobless figure.

"We don't expect any substantial improvement to the labor situation at all," says Richard Hastings, macro and consumer strategist at Global Hunter Securities in Newport Beach, Calif...

You mean all of the Democrat strategies -- Stimuli, massive payoffs to the unions, trial lawyer incentives, and the like -- don't help the real economy? Could someone let the legacy media know? Because they haven't reported that yet. It's only been about 80 years of serial failures, so one would hope they're beginning to get the picture.

Some economists also worry that the government is providing a disincentive to work by extending unemployment benefits. It's a Catch-22 in which the government is hoping to help the long-term unemployed that could backfire as people become less interested in finding work the longer they remain idle.

"What's keeping people out of the job market is they're giving extended benefits," says Doug Roberts, chief investment strategist at Channel Capital Research. "A lot of people, especially those who are older, are figuring, 'I'll keep my unemployment benefits for as long as I can get them until I can figure out what to do.'"

Like easy access to welfare and "misplaced sympathy", Democrat masterminds who attempt wealth redistribution schemes inevitably fail. Inevitably.

Morici, for one, takes issue with the notion that public policy is not jeopardizing the jobs market. A harsh critic of the Obama administration, he says the $780 billion stimulus was squandered on projects that don't help sustain industry and manufacturing and thus will not provide lasting economic relief.

"By and large they don't have a grasp of the scope of the problems, and we're not creating that much demand for labor," he says. "They're not putting the stimulus in the right places. This administration is really being run like a Junior Achievement project."

The electorate better get wise quick, because the fuse on the fiscal time-bomb has but a few moments to burn.