Obama Forecast: 95,000 Jobs per Month in 2010, Unemployment rate at 10%

Here is the Economic Forecast from the Economic Report of the President. The last column is average payroll jobs per month per year.

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The forecast is for an average of 95,000 non-farm payroll jobs to be added per month in 2010, with the unemployment rate averaging 10.0% and real GDP growth of 3.0%.

Although there is no way to directly calculate the unemployment rate based on payroll jobs growth – because the data is from different surveys and depends on the number of people in the work force and other factors – there is a fairly strong relationship between payroll jobs and the unemployment rate.

Based on my estimates, it would seem that 3.0% real GDP growth in 2010 would lead to about 160,000 payroll jobs per month and a slight decline in the unemployment rate.

Conversely, 95,000 jobs per month is probably consistent with real GDP growth at just over 2%, and an increase in the unemployment rate to over 10%. Based on their forecast for real GDP growth of 3%, it appears they are being conservative on their jobs forecast.