Here is my view of the 10 most important American economic policy issues of 2010.

1.  The weak U.S. macroeconomy

In 2010 a weak macroeconomy once again swamped in importance all other economic policy issues.  Forecasters had predicted a tough year — the 9.7% average unemployment rate for the first 11 months of the year is not far above the Administration’s 9.3% forecast for the year.

In 2011 the most important metric will once again be the unemployment rate.  Economically as well as politically the focus will once again be almost entirely on job creation.  We need the economy to be generating hundreds of thousands of net new jobs each month.  That is unlikely but not impossible.

Most forecasters project a stronger U.S. economic growth path in 2011 than 2010, but few are projecting that growth will be robust enough to bring the unemployment rate down rapidly.  While this week’s unemployment claims took a turn for the better, that’s a volatile data set, and the labor picture over the past few months has been weak.  If the forecasts hold up, things will be bad but improving throughout 2011.  You decide whether the politics and press will focus on the bad or the improving part.

Please remember not to lean too heavily on economic projections.  My rule of thumb is that the best macroeconomic forecasts get unreliable six months out and are not much more than guesses beyond a year.

2.  The failure of fiscal stimulus

This trend began in 2009 and solidified in 2010.  The fiscal stimulus debate camps and arguments are well established, and because the debate relies on comparison to a counterfactual it may never be provably resolved, allowing economists to argue ad nauseam.

Whatever your view on the policy question, as a political matter the stimulus failed miserably.  There are a few easily identifiable errors.

• The President repeatedly took too optimistic of a tone relative to what his experts projected on something that was largely beyond his control.
• Team Obama gambled and lost by creating an unverifiable “jobs saved or lost” metric.  Sometimes the unverifiability worked for them, but ultimately it broke against them because a job saved by policy is neither provable nor visible.
• The policy path the President chose in early 2009 (more accurately, the path to which he acquiesced when Congress chose it) set up countless “waste, fraud, and inefficiency” stories throughout 2010.
• After February 2009, every time the President signed another bill “to create jobs,” he […]