White House Budget Director, Peter Orzsag, gave an economic address to New York University today, in which he related the painful facts of a so-far jobless recovery and the tragic economic consequences to workers and families of sustained high levels of unemployment.

And then he dropped the subject, talked about everything except the obivious: the imperative for another stimulus and other measures to put people back to work.

First, here’s Orszag on job losses and why the limited recovery so far will not soon provide jobs:

Almost a year ago, in the fourth quarter of 2008, real GDP was declining at a rate of more than 6 percent per year. In that quarter alone, household net worth fell by almost $5 trillion, dropping at a rate of 30 percent a year.

In terms of employment, the fourth quarter saw a loss of 1.7 million jobs—the largest quarterly decline since the end of World War II and a number only to be exceeded by the next quarter when 2.1 million jobs were lost. . . .

Unfortunately, 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.

The sad fact is that unemployment lags a general recovery, and as the President has said, the coming months will continue to be difficult ones for American workers.

The typical progression in a recovery is first an increase in productivity; then an increase in hours worked; and finally, the hiring of additional workers by firms.

We are somewhere between the first and second stages of this process.

Orszag continues on what this means to workers over the long run:

A range of studies have found that having a parent experience unemployment is significantly associated with whether you graduate from high school, whether you go to college, whether you get a job after college, and how much you get paid in that job. And the effect is persistent – with higher high school dropout rates and lower college enrollment rates evident even years later.

Reflecting this, the children of workers who were once laid off have lower average wages as adults — even decades later than those whose parents never experienced such setbacks.

And even if you or your parent didn’t experience a layoff, the long-term repercussions of a recession are evident.

In other words, the impact extends to those not directly affected by unemployment – by those entering the workforce for the first time…the rising generation of workers. The adverse effect of entering the labor force during an economic downturn imposes a drag on career earnings that goes far beyond the duration of the recession itself.

One recent study, for example, found that graduating during a period of high unemployment leads to depressed initial wages–-roughly 6 percent on average for every one percentage point increase in unemployment. This negative wage effect declines only slowly over time: to 5 percent after five years, 4 percent after 10 years, and 3 percent even 15 years after graduation.

But having layed the economic and moral foundation for a massive jobs program/stimulus, Orszag just drops the topic. He talks about heathcare costs and reform and then focuses on how we’ll eventually need to deal with the $9 trillion in debt — from 10 years of accumulated budget deficits that, he carefully notes, were mostly handed to this Administration from the Bush era, the Bush recession, and Bush’s budget-busting tax cuts and unpaid-for Medicare Drug benefit. (For some curious reason, he ignores the fact America didn’t pay for its $1-3 trillion wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, either.)

That’s all fair, but does the White House really believe that it can acknowledge the dismal unemployment picture and then have its Budget Director ignore what all the smarter economists are screaming about the need to spend hundreds of billions more to put people back to work?

There’s a serious disconnect in this White House, and it appears to pervade the very top of the President’s economic and political advisers.

We’re going to need another stimulus
Paul Krugman, Too Little of a Good Thing
More Krugman here and here.
Mark Zandi, Help Small Businesses Hire Again

Bruce Bartlett, FDL Book Salon on The New American Economy
James Galbraith, No Return to Normal
Brad DeLong, We Can Afford a Second Stimulus

Mark Thoma, The weakest recovery in modern history?

NYT, Obama to announce small business stimulus
Yglesias, Markets really do convey . . .