WASHINGTON - November 7, 2010 - Without additional government action to spur hiring, President Obama said Sunday that he fears the U.S. economy could enter a "new normal" in which corporate profits are high but the number of new jobs is too low to reduce the nation's 9.6% unemployment rate to pre-Depression levels.

"What is a danger is that we stay stuck in a new normal where unemployment rates stay high," he said in an interview aired Sunday night on CBS's 60 Minutes. "People who have jobs see their incomes go up. Businesses make big profits. But they've learned to do more with less, so they don't hire. As a consequence, we keep on seeing growth that is just too slow to bring back the 8 million jobs that were lost."

The sit-down interview, Obama's first since Republicans gave him what he called a "shellacking" in last week's congressional midterm elections, focused heavily on the fragile economy and its starring role in the reversal of Democrats' political fortunes. He lamented his inability to make more headway in creating jobs, conceding that "I do get discouraged."

"I thought the economy would have gotten better by now," he said. "One of the things I think you understand as president is you're held responsible for everything. But you don't always have control of everything."