Hitting double-digits for the first time in a generation, U.S. unemployment reached 10.2 percent last month, up from 9.8 percent in September.

The October rate is the highest since late 1982. The Christian Science Monitor reports, “After dismal jobs report, unemployment rate could hit postwar high,” the new government data has economists reconsidering their earlier economic projections.

“We have been forecasting a 10.5 percent peak for the unemployment rate in mid-2010; given that it is already at 10.2 percent, this could be too low,” writes Joshua Shapiro, chief US economist for MFR Inc. in New York.

The $787 billion stimulus bill pushed by President Obama and passed by the Democratic-controlled Congress last February is looking increasingly like a failure of sorts. At the time, the Obama administration promised that passing the huge tax and spending bill would keep unemployment from rising above 8 percent.

A recent administration claimed that the stimulus bill had created or saved more than 600,000 jobs (how do you accurately measure how a job is “saved.”) But media analysises of the documentation has found numerous errors that contributed to an inflated count, “White House tally appears to overstate stimulus jobs.”

For example, raises paid to some preschool teachers with stimulus dollars were mistakenly counted as saved jobs.

And a Kentucky shoe store that supplied nine pairs of work boots to the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers counted the $800 expenditure as saving nine jobs.

That large of a bang for the buck was too good to be true.