If there was one thing that surprised me about President Obama’s State of the Union speech, it was how little he talked about unemployment.

While he did acknowledge the existence of the problem, Obama didn’t lay out any specific plan or strategy for creating more jobs in the short term; the speech was about “winning the future,” and it focused on long-term priorities like boosting K-12 education and R&D investment.

That sounds good, no doubt about it. But the need to prepare for the future doesn’t obviate the need to deal with the present – and the present is an incredibly weak labor market, especially in Rhode Island. Here’s a chart I had in mind as I read the speech while waiting for Obama’s arrival in the House chamber:

The number of jobs on Rhode Island payrolls bottomed out during the floods last April. But at the rate we’ve been going since then – an average of 112.5 jobs added a month – the state will not regain its previous employment peak until October 2045. That’s not a typo.

Now, I don’t think it’s actually going to take 34 years for the state to make up for all the jobs swept away by the Great Recession. But I do think it’s easy for those of us who are gainfully employed – a group which includes policymakers – to lose sight of the sheer scale of job destruction that took place over the last four years. It’s just astonishing.

Obama’s critics may say there’s little the federal government can do to boost employment, but that’s not really my point; Obama does believe the federal government can help, yet his speech offered no concrete proposals to assist states like Rhode Island, Nevada and California dig out of the hole they find themselves in.

Administration officials are depending on an uptick in the pace of economic growth to help bring down unemployment all across the country. Let’s hope their optimism is warranted this time around, because judging by Obama’s speech they don’t have a “Plan B” – and Japan-style stagnation would be even worse for Rhode Island than most other states.