The unemployment situation for the next three or four years is not good. Assuming there is no double dip recession, the unemployment rate will fall at a glacially slow pace.
My calculations assume that for the next two years, 200,000(about the average of what was added per month between 1992 and 2000) jobs will be added per month and around 150,000 new people will enter the labor force each month.
This would mean that by December 2010, the unemployment rate would fall to 9.4% and every six months after that, here are the projections:
July 2011: 9.2%
December 2011: 9%
July 2012: 8.7%
December 2012: 8.6%
These numbers assume that we have solid 3%-3.5% growth for the next 28 months.
Now lets try the numbers with 80,000 jobs added per month with 200,000 joining the labor force each month.
December 2010: 9.8%
July 2011: 10.3%
December 2011: 10.8%
July 2012: 11.3%
December 2012: 11.8%
These numbers about a half point less optimistic than the Obama adminstrations projections. The reason is that they think that economic growth will be close to 5% for the next two years, which I think is a bigger pipe dream than unemployment not going over 8%.
All of this assumes that there is no double dip recession on the horizon, which would in turn about about two percentage points to the unemployment rate for the next few years.