NICK GILLESPIE: Obama’s Jobs Program: If the Choice is Between “Go Big or Go Home,” Start Packing Now. Key bit: “All we’ve got—and all we’ve had for way too long—is uncertainty. Market uncertainty is beyond politicians’ control. But political certainty? That’s their job.”

UPDATE: Unexpectedly! “The Obama administration now says U.S. unemployment could persist at its current stubbornly high level around 9% well into 2012. . . . Administration officials said they downgraded their projections for economic growth and employment largely because of recent unexpected weakness in the U.S. economy, particularly ongoing turmoil in the housing market and slackening demand for exports.”

As Nick Gillespie notes above, despite their handwaving in the general direction of the Japanese earthquake, etc., the big problem is regime uncertainty brought about by their endless hare-brained schemes to transfer money from the productive sectors to their cronies. That’s caused employers to hunker down, quite reasonably, in fear of what might come next.

In other words, when they say “unexpected” they really mean “we didn’t expect that we’d be able to screw up the economy so badly.”