Paul Krugman (who really is freaking out about the administration's economic policies) explains why their inaction on high unemployment is so dangerous:

I really don’t think people appreciate the huge dangers posed by a weak response to 9 1/2 percent unemployment, and the highest rate of long-term unemployment ever recorded.

Right now, I’m reading Larry Ball on hysteresis in unemployment (pdf) — the tendency of high unemployment to become permanent. Ball provides compelling evidence that weak policy responses to high unemployment tend to raise the level of structural unemployment, so that inflation tends to rise at much higher unemployment rates than before. And the kind of unemployment we’re experiencing now, with many workers jobless for very long periods, is precisely the kind of unemployment likely to leave workers permanently unemployable.

And there are already indications that this is happening. Bill Dickens, one of the people has who worked on downward nominal rigidity, tells me that the Beveridge curve — the relationship between job vacancies and the unemployment rate — already seems to have shifted out dramatically. This has, in the past, been a sign of a major worsening in the NAIRU, the non-accelerating-inflation rate of unemployment.

The point is that while policy makers may think they’re being prudent and appropriately cautious in their responses to unemployment, there’s a good chance that they’re prudenting and cautiousing us into a long-term jobs catastrophe.