The Recovery That Wasn’t

Great, great piece by John Merline over at Investors.com about the “recovery” that we keep hearing about. Calling this a recovery is like calling me a pro hockey player: you can say it all day long, but it doesn’t make it true.

A quick highlight:

In his recent speeches on the campaign trail and at official functions, President Obama typically touts the fact that over the past two years, the economy has created more than 4 million new jobs, with more than 1 million in the past six months alone.

At a fundraiser last month, he called this “extraordinary progress.”

But the economic recovery that Obama has presided over has been far from extraordinary. It hasn’t even been ordinary.

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The current recovery is so slow, in fact, that it just barely beats GDP growth 11 quarters after the 1980 recession ended — even though there was the intervening long and painful 1981-82 recession. And unless GDP shoots up in Q2, the current recovery will soon be the absolute worst since the Great Depression.

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“Unlike previous recoveries, we actually saw household incomes drop faster during the recovery than they did during the recession itself,” said Gordon Green, who co-founded Sentier.

Be sure to read the whole thing.