The United States is currently in the midst of a jobs crisis more severe than any since the Great Depression. Many policy decisions made in Washington over the last three years have exacerbated this crisis by increasing overall economic uncertainty. It is imperative that the next president understand the nature of the problem and be willing to rectify the situation.

The national unemployment rate — which fell from 10.1 percent in October 2009 to 8.5 percent last month — understates how severe the jobs crisis really is. An unemployed person who can’t find work and decides to stop looking for a job is no longer counted as “unemployed” according to the official statistics. If it weren’t for the large numbers of people who have simply given up on looking for a job over the last few years, the unemployment rate would be around 11 percent.

It gets worse: Since President Obama took office, the average duration of unemployment has skyrocketed from under 20 weeks to over 40 weeks. For comparison, this number has never been above 22 weeks since at least the Great Depression. This poses a significant problem, as many workers’ skills atrophy while they are unemployed. The longer someone is unemployed, the less employable they become. The harm caused by this crisis will be with us for years to come.

But why is the jobs crisis so severe? I have already written ad nauseam about how the process of deleveraging is constraining consumer spending (“Drowning in Debt,” Sept. 21, and “The Right Target,” Nov. 2). However, there is another malady afflicting our economy — an increase in policy-induced economic uncertainty that has constrained business investment and hiring.

In many situations, a business’ decision to hire or invest is difficult to reverse. Thus, when there is uncertainty pertaining to the costs or benefits of this decision, a business will often postpone the decision in order to wait for more information. In aggregate, this means that increases in overall economic uncertainty will temporarily reduce business investment and hiring.

Stanford U. economists Scott Baker and Nicholas Bloom and U. Chicago economist Steven Davis recently constructed an index of policy-induced economic uncertainty. Not surprisingly, this index spiked during the financial crisis. However, unlike after other crises, uncertainty has not returned to its normal levels; instead, throughout the entire Obama presidency, the level of policy-induced uncertainty has remained consistently more than double its average over the previous 25 years. The blame largely lies with recently-enacted legislation as well as uncertainty about future regulations. For example, Dodd-Frank and the Affordable Care Act are extraordinarily complicated pieces of legislation, and I doubt that there is a single person alive who currently understands how these bills will work in practice over the coming years. As a result, businesses have postponed many decisions to invest and hire until they know more about their future financial and health care costs. Baker, Bloom and Davis calculate that, if the level of policy-induced economic uncertainty were to return to its 2006 level, the economy would add 2.5 million jobs.

In order to put the nation back to work, we need a president who is focused on creating jobs, not a President who is intent on not letting, as Rahm Emanuel said, “a serious crisis go to waste.” Unfortunately, most of the Republican presidential candidates seem little better than President Obama on this count — they, too, seem primarily interested in implementing their legislative and regulatory agendas, regardless of the effects that this may have on the jobs crisis.

The obvious exception is Mitt Romney. His past executive experiences — at Bain Capital, the Salt Lake City Olympics, and as governor of Massachusetts — have shown him to be a pragmatic problem-solver rather than an ideologue with an agenda. His choice of economic advisors — Harvard’s Greg Mankiw and Columbia’s Glenn Hubbard, both well-respected economists — bears out this fact. Romney seems to be the candidate who best understands the link between policy decisions in Washington and the jobs crisis, and is thus in the best position to rectify the problem.

Without a change in direction, it is highly likely that policy-induced economic uncertainty will continue to bedevil the recovery, thereby causing severe hardship for millions of Americans. Given this dire possibility, I must conclude that Mitt Romney is the best person for the job.