krebscycle

Dean Baker’s CEPR published the following interesting graph which tells us both something interesting about the economy and something sadly dismal about how “progressive” economists keep confusing themselves.

Dean goes on to helpfully remind us of the real meaning of this graph.

Obama’s economic legacy:Months of consecutive job growth is sort of silly thing you tell kids,not real economic data https://t.co/cPQyiSMk1P

which is that that: Obama let us down again. You can see that after prior recessions there is a much faster recovery than after the 2007/8 recession. But look at the 2001 trace and see that little tumble at the end. If you added one more quarter, you’d see a near vertical drop. That’s because the “recovery” from the small 2001 recession was produced by massive counter-productive Federal spending (two wars plus Medicare Advantage subsidy to insurance companies are the big components) and a housing bubble engineered by Alan Greenspan’s Fed plus reckless suspension of banking regulation and  operation of the federal mortgage agencies (to the vast profit of “investors”). This “recovery” also saw massive growth of wealth inequality and collapse of manufacturing (which was disguised by the housing bubble).  There was no actual recovery during the Bush administration: there was a bubble constructed from corrosive military Keynesian and government subsidized real-estate/finance speculation. And when it all crashed, with millions of manufacturing jobs gone, the industrial base of the economy crumbling, infrastructure further drawn down, and 30 years of increasing income inequality crippling the economy – Obama’s recovery was slow. GDP is a nice simple measure, but it’s hardly a description of the economy.

You’d think that a “progressive” trying to evaluate Obama’s legacy would try to look a little deeper. For example:

Now a large set of data — from Enroll America, the group trying to sign up people for the program, and from the data firm Civis Analytics — is allowing a much clearer picture. The data shows that the law has done something rather unusual in the American economy this century: It has pushed back against inequality, essentially redistributing income — in the form of health insurance or insurance subsidies — to many of the groups that have fared poorly over the last few decades.The biggest winners from the law include people between the ages of 18 and 34; blacks; Hispanics; and people who live in rural areas.

But our progressive economists are both limited in terms of their analytical tools (for example, they don’t want to have to distinguish between economic effects of Fed spending on the Afghan war and on ACA health insurance subsidies) and committed to insisting that President Obama is stupid and weak. So tedious. If only we had a real left instead of this endless whinefest.