June 6, 2013
When libertarian scholar Peter Ferrara asked rhetorically in Sunday’s issue of Forbes, “Economically, Could Obama Be America’s Worst President?” he relied heavily onstatistics provided by the chief enabler of the Great Recession, the Federal Reserve. Noting that the policies of President Obama have done nothing to stimulate the economy but plenty to keep it from growing, he used recent economic recoveries as prime examples of what recoveries would look like if government would stay out of the way:
The right measure and comparison for Obama’s record is not to compare the recovery to the recession, but to compare Obama’s recovery with other recoveries from other recessions since the Great Depression. By that measure, what is clear is that Obamanomics has produced the worst recovery from a recession since the Great Depression, worse than what every other President who has faced a recession has achieved since the Great Depression.
Using data from the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis, Ferrara complained that it’s taken 64 months for the present recovery to regain the ground lost since the beginning of the Great Recession, whereas 64 months into the Reagan recovery, “jobs had grown 9.5% higher than where they were when [that] recession started, representing an increase of about 10 million more jobs.” By contrast, taking population growth into account, the present recession has cost 10 million jobs. The unemployment rate, according to Ferrara and the Minneapolis Fed, has stayed higher longer than at any time since the 1930s, and that’s using government figures and not the real unemployment rate (U6) that has been replaced by new “updated” calculations. Ferrara concluded: “This utterly failed jobs record of Obamanomics reflects the more basic reality that the economy has not been growing under President Obama.”
Ferrara rounded up additional statistics to support his point: The average American family is worse off, in inflation-adjusted terms, than they were before the Great Recession began in 2007. Poverty levels have increased, along with government regulations.
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