As I read Brad Schiller’s remarks in his op-ed in the LA Times, criticizing the Obama Administration’s record on the economy:
s Yale economist Ray Fair has documented, people really do vote their pocketbooks: Below-trend GDP growth, rising unemployment or increasing inflation almost always dooms the incumbent party.
That reality has Democrats more scared than Hillary Clinton’s emails or her dismal likeability and trust ratings.
Simply put, the current “recovery†is the weakest on record. GDP growth has been below the long-term trend of 3.1% in all but seven of the last 30 quarters. Fair’s statistical model of election outcomes predicts a Republican victory on that basis alone.
The Democrats are doing their utmost to distract attention from these facts. President Obama continues to brag that his policies rescued the economy from the brink of another Great Depression. As for Clinton, she vacillates between promising to jump-start the economy and defending the Obama administration’s record. Clinton surrogates tell us the economy is a whole lot better than it was when Obama took office, and even better than we think it is.
my reaction was that Democrats really need to make up their minds. If their story of the Great Recession is that it was regular business cycle recession, deeper than other many others but otherwise not particularly different, they need to step up to the reality of the facts that Dr. Schiller lays out. Practically every measure proposed since 2008 has been ordinary Keynesian pump-priming and it’s flopped.
If, on the other hand, the recession was as serious as it was because of excessive indebtedness, a “balance sheet recession”, they should be demanding that President Obama and, presumably, President Clinton if she takes over the Oval Office in January address the specific problems of a balance sheet recession. We should be able to do better than 1% growth.
