The White House's chief economist Austan Goolsbee has described the figures as a mere "bump in the road." In reality they should be a massive wake-up call for an administration that refuses to acknowledge the huge damage its big government policies have done to the American economy, with 13.9 million Americans now out of work.

Under President Obama unemployment has remained above 8 percent for every single month, with the exception of January 2009 when he entered the Oval Office, rising as high as 10.1 percent in October 2009. By any measure, this is a terrible track record, and as even The New York Times acknowledged earlier this week, "no American president since Franklin Delano Roosevelt has won a second term in office when the unemployment rate on Election Day topped 7.2 percent."