The Recovery That Wasn’t
Two weeks after being sworn in as the 44th
president of the United States, President Barack Obama told CNN:
“The only measure of my success as president when people look back
five years from now or nine years from now is going to be, Did
I get this economy fixed?â€
By his own criterion, Obama deserves to be judged harshly.
Headline unemployment, which the incoming administration projected
to top out at 8.0 percent as long as its landmark February 2009
stimulus package was passed, has yet to be lower than 8.0
percent. The labor force non-participation rate—the percentage of
healthy, working-age Americans who are no longer actively seeking a
job and therefore not counted in headline unemployment
statistics—has steadily climbed from 34.2 percent (then a
two-decade high) in the month before Obama took office to 36.2
percent as of press time.
Meanwhile, administration officials have spent the intervening
time claiming, absurdly, that the economy is on the mend. Federal
Reserve Bank Chairman Ben Bernanke famously spoke of economic
“green shoots†as early as March 2009, while unemployment was
zooming northward toward the 10 percent mark. “Welcome to the
recovery,†Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner announced in The
New York Times more than two years ago. In June of this year,
President Obama claimed that “The truth of the matter is that…we’ve
created 4.3 million jobs over the last…27 months; over 800,000 just
this year alone. The private sector is doing fine.â€
That gap between rhetoric and reality shows
no signs of closing. Promises of economic interventionists have
gone unfulfilled, but the proposals remain the same. On the
following pages you will see two timelines. One depressing mountain
range depicts the distance between the administration’s 8.0 percent
unemployment worst-case claim and a reality that has been
considerably worse; the other uses as a baseline the
once-catastrophic 34.2 percent labor force non-participation rate
that now seems to be an unreachable low.
Above and below the lines you will see an illustrated collection
of administration quotations about this wonderful recovery we
should start enjoying any minute now. It’s a humorous if grim
reminder that Keynesian remedies don’t work as advertised, and that
politicians will say anything—no matter how ridiculous—to maintain
their grip on power.Â
