The Endless Economic Recovery--worst since WWII

The Endless Economic Recovery

 

Economy: If you needed another metric by which to measure the failure of Obamanomics, new numbers released Friday show that two years after the recession ended the economy still hasn't fully recovered.

According to the revised gross domestic product data released Friday, the nation's economy grew a paltry 1% in the second quarter, after eking out a barely noticeable 0.4% gain in the first.

As a result, two years after the recession ended, the economy still hasn't made up the ground it lost, giving Obama the dubious distinction of presiding over the most prolonged economic recovery since the Great Depression.

This isn't just slightly bad. It's monumentally bad.
An IBD review of all the post-World War II recessions shows that, on average, it took just over two fiscal quarters for the economy to recover from a downturn and start expanding again.
In contrast, we're eight quarters into the Obama recovery, and the expansion is somewhere off in the distance, with real GDP still $65.5 billion below the pre-recession peak. And if you take into account all the population growth that's occurred over the past two years, we're even further behind.

Obama likes to blame the depth of the downturn for the "painfully slow" recovery. "We didn't get into this mess overnight, and we won't get out of it overnight. It's going to take time," he said — nearly a year ago.

The claim is bogus. This recession lasted only slightly longer than the 1981-82 contraction — 18 months vs. 16 — and wasn't as severe when measured by peak unemployment.

But the economy came screaming out of that downturn, and in three quarters was already well into an expansion. The 1973-75 recession lasted 16 months, but also took only three quarters to fully recover.
Obama's also fond of blaming the sluggish recovery on the fact the recession resulted from a "financial crisis," alleging that something about that kind of recession makes for a longer recovery time. But it's not like all the other slumps didn't have any hint of financial crisis behind them.

Now he and his friends have taken to blaming bad luck and Republican bad faith for supposedly weakening what had been an improving economy.

"In 2010 ... we were growing," Obama's former chief economic adviser Austan Goolsbee said Thursday. "Now, at the beginning of this year, we get earthquakes, tsunamis, revolutions in the Middle East, European financial crises. Now we got earthquakes outside of Washington, D.C."

But Obama's recovery was vastly inferior to previous ones well before these alleged headwinds emerged. Plus, revised GDP numbers show that the recovery was softening throughout 2010, with GDP growth slowing in each successive quarter.

For that, Obama has only his own economic medicine to blame. His preferred treatment — huge hikes in federal spending, massive new environmental and financial regulations, ObamaCare, an out-of-control labor relations board, verbal attacks on businesses and the rich, etc. — just isn't working to get the economy back on its feet.

If a patient were taking an unusually long time to recover from an illness, a responsible doctor would try a new treatment regimen, rather than simply administer larger doses of the same drugs. He might even consult other doctors to see if they've had better luck with different prescriptions.

But Dr. Obama gives no sign of doing anything other than pump more Keynesian medicine into the IV. It's possible he'll try a different approach in September, when he gives his much-anticipated jobs speech. If he doesn't, it will be nothing short of malpractice.

http://www.investors.com/NewsAndAnalysis/Article/583026/201108261859/The-Endless-Economic-Recovery.aspx