Obama Stresses Plan's Job Potential

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Obama: New Layoffs Show Need for Urgent Action

President-elect Barack Obama called latest report of U.S. job losses Friday 'a stark reminder of how urgently action is needed' to revive the nation's staggering economy.

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Bernstein, slated be to chief economic adviser to Vice President-elect Joseph R. Biden Jr., and Romer, who is the administration's designate to chair the Council of Economic Advisers, cautioned that their assumptions could miss the mark.

"It should be noted that all of the estimates presented in this memo are subject to significant margins of error," the pair wrote, adding: "The current recession is unusual both in its fundamental causes and its severity."

Mark Zandi, chief economist and co-founder of Moody's Economy.com, said he wishes the Obama team had not proposed spending money on the business tax credits, but he said the estimates on the job growth were "very close to my own."

"The results are in line with what we should see, about 3 to 4 million jobs," said Zandi, whose modeling on job creation was used in the Obama team's report.

David Shulman, a senior economist at UCLA's Anderson Forecast, which analyzes economic trends, said he agreed with the need for stimulus. But he questioned whether there were enough projects ready over the next two years for the Obama team to meet its projections on creating jobs in energy and infrastructure. The advisers predicted that the stimulus package's energy projects would create more than 450,000 jobs and that infrastructure projects would create 377,000.

"There's not enough shovel-ready, so to speak," he said. "I'm skeptical of how you're going to do that in a two-year period."

Staff writers Lori Montgomery, Neil Irwin and Michael A. Fletcher and staff researcher Magda Jean-Louis contributed to this report.