The chairwoman of the White House council of economic advisers repeats the warning of many of her colleagues:

White House Council of Economic Advisers Chairwoman Christina Romer said that, in 2010, the economy will likely grow but the jobless rate will peak at 10 percent and won’t start falling at a rapid clip.

[ . . .]

She added that “it will take a lot of rapid GDP growth … to bring [unemployment] down to normal levels.”

White House economists in recent days have warned that the economic recovery won’t be swift. Lawrence Summers, director of the National Economic Council, said last week that unemployment will “remain unacceptably high for a number years.”

The White House’s mid-year budget review predicted 3.3 percent GDP growth and a full-year unemployment rate of 9.8 percent in 2010. While the economy would grow by at least 5 percent in each of the following six years, the jobless rate would remain above 6 percent until 2014, according to the official White House forecast. The unemployment rate in 2007, before the recession began, was less than 5 percent.

While the honesty is refreshing, there is an apparent lack of understanding—or curiosity—about why the unemployment rate is going to remain so high. Well, we had a lot of job losses right away. And productivity is very high. Hmm. Isn’t there something else at play here?

It seems the elephant in the room is the administration’s own agenda. The prospect of higher taxes, more regulation, health-care mandates, a trade war with China, and an ever-growing mound of debt just waiting to be “monetized” somehow have not jump-started growth and hiring. There are plenty of independent economists looking at this issue and many ideas on how to spur job growth. The administration, however, continues to push for policies at odds with job growth in the private sector. Romer might not want to point this out, but the critics of the president and of the congressional authors of the raft of legislation (which treats the private sector as the cause and not the solution to our economic problems) haven’t been—and won’t be in upcoming elections—so silent.