Today, President Obama is scheduled to deliver his highly anticipated jobs speech. It will be delivered against the backdrop of growing concern that the economy is already back in recession.

Last Friday, the U.S. Department of Labor released its latest employment report—and it wasn’t pretty. In August, the economy stalled out. Businesses created no new jobs. Technically, the report indicated that 17,000 jobs were created, but out of a workforce of 153 million, such a low number is statistically zero. It could just as well have been -17,000 jobs.

Even if the economy did gain 17,000 jobs last month, at that rate the unemployment level would never go positive. Economists estimate that the economy needs to create 150,000 jobs per month just to keep up with the rate of population growth.

According to the Labor Department, the unemployment rate is 9.1 percent—approximately where it was in April. However, this measure of unemployment does not include discouraged workers who have given up looking for work, or those people who are working part-time because they cannot find full-time employment. Include these individuals, and the government says unemployment is really 16.2 percent.

However, economist John Williams at ShadowStats.com, says the real unemployment rate is even higher. According to him, if the government calculated the numbers the way it did before 1994, they would show an unemployment rate above 22 percent—which is “the highest level seen in the current, protracted economic downturn.”

The unemployment report also indicated that wages are falling. The average salary for a private sector worker dropped by 3 cents to $23.09 per hour. The number of hours that employees worked also fell.

“Americans are enduring painful long-term joblessness,” said an official from Congressman Ron Paul’s office. “They’re witnessing their savings disappear due to lost income. They’re seeing their personal debt rise due to lost income. And they gaze despairingly upon their retirement plans as these arrangements are tabled or upended entirely.”

It is just a small taste of what is to come. As the Trumpet wrote in April 2007, an economic “mega storm” is on the way. The forces of inflation (money printing by the Federal Reserve) and deflation (debt collapse) are tearing America apart at the seams. No economy can prosper under such circumstances.

Administration officials have been promising jobs for three years now, yet to little avail. Expect more of the same. And also expect the same result.

The jobs are not coming back anytime soon. Another recession is on the way. And America is on the verge of the next stage of economic collapse.