Here in 2016, the American economy has not recorded even one year of 3 percent growth for ten straight years now. This has never happened before. The recovery from the deep crisis of 2008-09 is easily the worst post-recession record since statistics began to be compiled three quarters of a century ago. The Barack Obama recovery is about a third as strong as the Ronald Reagan recovery from the similarly severe crisis of 1980-82.
Joblessness remains at ridiculous levels. Some 10 million more positions would exist in the economy today if the trends of the 1980s and 1990s had held. The percentage of employment-age Americans who consider themselves members of the workforce has fallen to levels last seen in the 1970s, when women were still moving into the labor market.
What is it like to exit an eight-year presidency amid these statistics, these deplorable realities that bedevil tens of millions of Americans caught in unprecedented sluggishness and no-growth?
It certainly is an opportunity. It is an opportunity for maturity, grace, and resolve to be a part of the solution—or to get out of the way as a solution at last emerges under someone else’s auspices. Legitimate options include to ski or golf or memoir-write away one’s post-presidency. LBJ grew long hair. The bachelor James Buchanan considered marriage during the Lincoln years, dispatching the idea with this thought: “Someone can bring my meals, but I’ll be damned to engage in conversation.” These are the becoming and droll options after an unsuccessful presidency. They do not seem to be in the offing in the current case.
Bad sign #1 is that President Obama is going to settle in Washington, D.C after this January. He’s closing on a house, not in Hawaii, as any rational person would have it, but in the swampland across and upriver from Mt. Vernon. Let’s hope he ditches the place after a few years, as Jackie Kennedy did her Georgetown digs. Because the temptation will be strong, in the National City, for Barack Obama to have, like Jimmy Carter, a “relevant,” which is to say a meddling, evasive, and score-settling post-presidency.
Bad sign #2 comes from the Executive Office of the President, namely the Council of Economic Advisers. Guess how these guys are spending their last golden days in office? Writing up preposterous research that lets their guy off the hook.
The first thing the CEA is doing—and this is a positive development—is owning up to the fact that the huge drop in labor-force participation under Obama does not owe, the whole of it, to the retirement of the first tranche of the baby boomers. The administration relied on this phony line for fully five years of the weak recovery. The claim was so easy to disprove, statistically—look at labor-force participation for those under 65, and the claim vanishes—that it was getting weird that the administration was still holding onto and mouthing it.
Instead of leaving it at that, however, the CEA is now trotting out other explanations of the collapse of the participation rate, each one questionable and having the effect of exonerating the president. These come care of a CEA report that chair Jason Furman is touting, particularly two of the report’s big claims.