Currently, there are roughly 14.0 million people without a job in the United States.  As of August 2011, the unemployment rate was reported at 9.1 percent of the nation’s population. This percentage seems to have been constant since last April.

The Office of Management and Budget, the very White House agency responsible for forecasting, producing and presenting the president’s budget proposals to U.S. Congress, has reported that current unemployment rate is likely to remain the same until after the 2012 presidential election.

If this forecast proves certain, and if analysts and public opinion makers (i.e., see Charles M. Blow’s article “For jobs, It’s War,” The New York Times, Saturday, September 17, 2011, page A 21) are right that job creation should be the most important USA priority as of now, President Obama’s re-election bid seems to be doomed, despite his hastily proposed jobs bill. The problem lies in that his bill cannot pass without Republicans’ support. And if unemployment rate continues to rise, Obama’s approval rating would continue to plunge, which, in the eyes of voters, would favor Republican presidential candidates.

But the story doesn’t end here; Obama’s re-election fate has been aggravated even more by the recent report of the Census Bureau’s Current Population Survey Annual Social and Economic Supplement, indicating that the number of poor people in the country, mostly non Hispanic Whites living in urban America’s inner cities such as the Bronx, Los Angeles, and Miami, have consecutively increased from 43.6 million in 2009 to 46.2 million in 2010.

In addition, considering current student drop out rates in high school, colleges and universities, one could effortlessly conclude the U.S. faces a huge challenge to train and retain a competitive labor force to be able to compete against China, emerging economies and markets demanding more tech-savvy and highly sophisticated workers.

It seems that at this juncture, moving into the first quarter of the twenty first century, the U.S. suffers from the so called “cash 22” paradox coined by Joseph Heller, author of Catch-22, a novel he published in 1961 about the irrationality of bureaucratic decisions and logic. Outcome B only happens if input A is present. In other words, an input or something should, or must happen in order to produce intended outcome. The effect of John Stuart Mill’s invisible hand principle is rendered questionable with this construct.

Applying the cash-22 paradox to current U.S. state of affairs, an obvious conclusion would include logical reasoning that increasing school drop out rates, low-quality and low investment in education, crumbling infrastructure, increasing poverty rate, widening achievement gap, and a neglected uncompetitive labor force, will not help lower prevalent unemployment rate or prepare the country to compete in the global economy, much less advance President Obama’s re-election aspiration. On all counts, under this scenario, aggravated by Obama’s plunging approval rating, his re-election bid seems doomed. And to me,  his fate would definitely favor the eventual Republican presidential candidate in 2012.