White House officials were out in force yesterday, talking up the economy in the wake of the best jobs report in almost three years. Senior economic adviser Larry Summers thinks we’ve about reached “escape velocity” according to this report in the Financial Times and Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner told Bloomberg the self-sustaining recovery is here.

While Geithner had earlier said the unemployment rate is “going to stay unacceptably high for a long time”, that view was tempered a bit in this interview. On housing, he noted that “a million Americans are now benefiting from an average of $600 a month in lower monthly payments on their mortgage debt”, a statistic that is very deceptive in a number of ways, the most significant being that only a small portion of the million loan mods are permanent.

What he should really tout is that, thanks to the government’s efforts to delay foreclosures, some seven million Americans have stopped paying their mortgage and another five million underwater homeowners may soon join them (per Amherst Securities last week), all of which will boost consumer spending and the economy as a whole…