WASHINGTON — The pace of job creation will lag even as the
U.S. economy recovers, White House budget director Peter Orszag warned Tuesday,
adding that the coming months “will continue to be difficult ones for
American workers.”
In remarks prepared for delivery at New York University, the
director of the Office of Management and Budget said the economy is
“somewhere between” the stages when hours worked increase and
additional workers are hired.
“Unfortunately,” Orszag said, “even as the
economy begins to turn around, the employment picture isn’t going to brighten
immediately — as the contrast between the recently reported GDP numbers and the
unemployment numbers that we are expecting later this week will likely
illustrate.”
Economists surveyed by MarketWatch expect that nonfarm
payrolls shed 150,000 jobs in October and that the U.S. unemployment rate will
tick up to 9.9 percent. The report is due out Friday morning.
The U.S. economy grew by 3.5 percent in the third quarter,
the Commerce Department reported last week.
Orszag and others credit the $787 billion economic-stimulus
bill signed by President Barack Obama earlier this year with adding to growth
and creating jobs.
“Effectively all the growth in real GDP during the
third quarter could be attributable — either directly or indirectly — to the
recovery act,” Orszag said.
Last week, the White House said that the stimulus plan
directly created or saved more than 650,000 jobs and that it’s “solidly on
track” to meet its job-creation goal of 3.5 million jobs by the end of
2010.
Orszag also repeated that Obama is committed to cutting the
federal deficit and that health-care reform legislation before Congress won’t
add to the deficit.
