by Daniel Costello

When he announced a White House jobs summit last month, Mr. Obama said he was determined to meet the "great challenge" of unemployment. And what a challenge it is: the unemployment rate is at 10.2 percent — a 26-year high and rising. Eight million jobs have been eliminated so far in two years of recession.

And yet it's hard to know exactly what will come from today's summit. Critics have complained it's more a glorified public-relations stunt and they may have a point.

While a slew of the country's best and brightest executives, financiers, small business owners and labor leaders are in Washington to discuss how to create jobs, even Press Secretary Robert Gibbs acknowledged yesterday that the government alone cannot repair economic damage this severe on its own. Translation: the White House was downplaying today's results before the start.

 

The reality is that the Administration, packed with some of the best known economists alive, already knows what tools it could use to help stem unemployment. Among them: extending unemployment benefits and subsidies for COBRA health benefits; more fiscal relief for cash-strapped states; new funds for direct job creation, especially for young people under 25 years old, who have a 19 percent unemployment rate, and African-American and Hispanic men who are facing joblessness at 34.5 percent.

Previous stimulus funds have helped. Just this week, the non-partisan Congressional Budget Office said the stimulus generated up to 1.6 million jobs during the fourth quarter, far exceeding even the administration's claims that it had saved or created 640,000 jobs. The Labor Department surprised everyone this morning by reporting that first-time unemployment claims fell to their lowest level in a year last week.

Still, the real results will come in the next few weeks when the Administration decides if it really wants to spend the political and deficit capital to pump up more jobs — and if Congress goes along if it does. At the end of the day, that's likely alot more important to watch than what's going on today.