President Obama didn’t have time to take “victory laps” back in 2009 when he was saving the economy from the worst recession since the Great Depression, because he was too busy with the saving. We know he didn’t have the time because he said so reflecting on the matter in April, when he was taking that victory lap at long last, at a battery plant in Florida that would not exist absent government pork that the president’s stimulus had arranged. The president’s words, the victory lap, rang out, the sound waves scarcely interrupted by obstacles in the employee parking lot, because the battery outfit appears to take the pork and hire nobody.
President Obama’s economic record is solidified 7-plus years since 2009, the 0.8% growth rate last quarter being all you need to know. This president came in during a recession, and over long years gave us stagnation.
In his talkative moments, such as in Florida, the president tries to duck and weave. We expect American leadership to do far better than he did, so what happened? He does not straighten up and say, let’s make way for someone else to do better. He offers explanations. Which is to say rationalizations and excuses.
They come in two categories. The first defies good manners. This is his referencing of people’s anger getting the better of them, people’s refusal to acknowledge that things are better. The president probably—probably—knows that such rhetorical excursions are in poor taste, are non-falsifiable non-arguments which should not leave one’s own cranium, and suggest an incapacity or unwillingness on his part to think through things correctly. Journalists goad the president into this “rut” (Obama’s favorite economic-status-quo metaphor of 2009), and he will spend time in it before moving on to category #2, the faux-empirical excuses.
The biggie here is the “headline” unemployment rate. Unemployment is down below 5%. That’s nice and low, lower than Ronald Reagan ever got in the 1980s, the kind of thing we have only seen when Lyndon Johnson was mopping up excess juveniles with the Vietnam draft back in the late 1960s and during the Bill Clinton-Robert Rubin technocracy of the late 1990s.
The problem with this argument is twofold. First, so many people have despaired of finding a job in the Obama economy that they have quit the workforce. The headline unemployment number by definition does not include these people. The sad thing is to see experts running interference for the president, saying Americans are dropping out of the workforce for good reasons (baby boomers are retiring), when sub-65-year-olds are demonstrably less employed to the tune of perhaps 15 million compared to earlier this millennium.
The disturbing problem with this argument is that it is offensive. Tens of millions are not getting by in this country because of the endless stagnation, and the president says we are in full employment. You don’t make people who are down tools in your prestidigitation. But here is the president doing just that. Rather shameful.
The second favorite empirical excuse is that the budget deficit has gone down. President Obama (with Congress, to be sure) has racked up an average of $840 billion per year in deficits. The yearly number now is $615 billion. This current figure is lower than that of fiscal year 2009, initiated under George W. Bush’s presidency (beginning date October 1, 2008). 2009’s deficit was $1.4 trillion. So under President Obama the deficit has been more than halved.