Jonathan Chait’s piece in the New Yorker opens with this statement:
Joe Biden assumed the presidency confronting an economic crisis reminiscent of the one that faced him when he and Barack Obama took office 12 years earlier.
and there’s so much wrong with it that I simply couldn’t get past it. Let’s start with why it’s bad economics.
The interpretation of the Great Recession and the subsequent phlegmatic recovery that is kindest, i.e. most favorable to the Obama Administration’s response to it, is as a “balance sheet recession”, i.e. a consequence of excessive private debt. That is emphatically not the case with the present recession. Private debt has actually declined substantially during the recession. The strongest similarity is that they’re both recessions. There are additional differences for example that the recession was already over by the time the first dollar of the ARRA was actually disbursed.
On top of that there are enormous political differences. Obama had considerably more charm than Biden does as well as much more energy. Obama actually had a mandate. Democrats had significantly greater majorities in both houses of Congress than at present. We hadn’t had a couple of decades of incredibly self-serving governments. And of course social media were in their infancy.
Read it if you must. It opened with such a blooper I couldn’t continue on.
