Are you better off now than you were four years ago?

"Osama bin Laden is dead, GM is alive" is a nice slogan, all the more so for being true. Things are not as bad as they might have been after the economic disaster that revealed itself toward the end of the Bush administration, thanks in some part to the efforts of the incumbent President. Yet, still, things suck. 

The fact that Obama is still a contender with unemployment at 8.3% shows that a lot of people believe that answering the four-year question involves more than comparing a snapshot of life during the last five minutes of the bubble to the realities of its aftermath. This was no ordinary downturn, and there was not going to be an ordinary recovery.  

It's hard to see how repeating the policies pursued in the run-up to disaster makes much sense, but bad Bush-era decisions weren't the whole problem. Lessons about banking and human nature learned by our great-grandparents began to fade long before the turn of the millennium. And the problems caused by this Great Forgetting don't tell the whole story of what has happened to the American worker. Tectonic shifts like globalization and technological change are so resistant to political fixes (and so beneficial to powerful interests) that they don't even register in presidential politics.

So, the big question of the week strikes me as kind of a dumb question.

Comments

[Spag]

It's interesting how many people try to categorize the entire presidency of George W. Bush based on that "last five minutes of the bubble".

As soon as you find a candidate that is running with a plan to repeat the policies that were pursued in the run-up to the disaster, please let me know so I can be sure not to vote for him.

Some dissent from your opinion about the success of Obama's efforts.

"So we're not better off than we were four years ago, but it could be worse" is the new Obama campaign slogan?

Maybe we can agree that Bush sucks, Obama sucks, and it's time for a change.

[Andrew Brod]

"As soon as you find a candidate that is running with a plan to repeat the policies that were pursued in the run-up to the disaster, please let me know so I can be sure not to vote for him."

Duh. Romney.

[Spag]

Bush and Obama cut spending and tackled entitlement reform?

[polifrog]

Do you remember more Bush the campaigner or Bush the leader?

What of Obama? Do you remember Obama the campaigner or Obama the leader?

The difference between the two is failed leadership.

The sense of "Obama the messiah" is gone because Obama failed to rise to the aura of his own pitch. It is for that reason every attempt to rekindle yesterday's magic during the current campaign has failed.

And that will not change, for a messianic figure quantified is no messiah and one quantified by his own measures of failure even less so.

That said, yesterday's hubris can be tamed and even forgiven by today's humility. Presidents are human as even Obama's staunchest supporters know. But nothing I have seen thus far indicates that Obama intends to embrace humility or is even capable of humility.

That is Obama's insurmountable hurdle - the belief that in the face of failure he can overcome yesterday's hubris without humility.

And if Obama fails to embrace and sell his humility during the DNC he will have never, in the eyes of the electorate, matured into a leader worthy of a second term.

[Andrew Brod]

Increased spending and the lack of entitlement reform aren't what caused the 2008-09 recession.

What did? For one, lack of sensible financial regulation. Yet Romney would repeal Dodd-Frank, and he opposes any further measures to go where D-F falls short.

Ergo, according to Spag, he's not going to vote for Romney.

[Ed Cone]

"Bush sucks, Obama sucks, and it's time for a change."

That's actually a very rough paraphrase of my post.

I don't think it's quite that simple, because there are degrees of suckiness and reasons for suckiness, but what I'm trying to say is that we have huge systemic problems, some of which are not even part of the presidential discussion and some of which go back decades. That's why I think the four years question seems puny and off-point.

Also, the point I was trying to make about the very end of Bush's presidency is not that it was the only bad part, just that it was four years ago. The bad decisions I referred to didn't start in Q3 '08.

So, yes, it's time for a change. But to what? We have the choices we have (third party blah blah aside, it's going to be Romney or Obama in November). So whatever change we get now is going to have to come through one of those two.

[justcorbly]

MIddle-class incomes have been wallowing and going nowhere since the Carter Adminitration. That's close to 40 years of wage stagnation. The Great Borrowing of the 2000's disguised that for a few years, but obviously made matters a lot worse. Globalization, running corporations in the interests of execs not stockholders, proliferation of tempting financial gizmos, etc., etc., mean there are lots of ways to make even more money that don't have much at all to do with creating jobs or increasing wages. The percentage of Americans working in manufacturing is back to pre-WW2 levels.

Economic change, though, isn't something that happens by magic. It's not imposed on us by fate. It's the result of decisions we make. I.e., something's happening here, Mr. Jones.

On the Bush-Sucked, Obama-Sucks question: Obama disappointed me in the first 2 years by being less FDR and more policy wonk. He often governed as if he saw his role as Legislator-in-Chief. Legislation and policy are important, but leadership is the president's real job. (Bush was MIA in that regard until he wrapped himself in 911.)

Still, I'm sure GOP economic policy will make matters worse, and GOP social policy scares me to death, so, for the time being, I figure I'm better off with anyone other than a Republican.

[Ron]

People forget that we were on the brink of another great depression. It takes a LONG time to get the economy back on track when things get that bad. We are not going to be where we were in the 1990s in four years. Its not realistic for any president regardless of party. We are not there yet and we have along way to go, but the number of jobs in the private sector are growing.

[Andrew Brod]

Changes in U.S. payroll employment (SA), four years ago:

September '08: -432,000
October '08: -489,000
November '08: -803,000
December '08: -661,000
January '09: -818,000

That's a total of 3.2 million jobs lost in just those five months. I'm not sure the "are you better off" question is the right one, but yeah, we're better off than we were in the fall of 2008.

[polifrog]

Ron:

People forget that we were on the brink of another great depression.

A crash is not a depression, however a depression can follow a crash when growth is stymied by interventionist policies like those that resulted in the Great Depression, Japan's current Depression (call it what it is), and our current Keynesian Depression.

Four years of wilted green shoots is not a recession. It is a depression. The fact is that when we had the chance to avoid this depression we, instead, embraced it and Obama was part and parcel of that embrace.

[Ishmael]

How did we "embrace" the depression other than to continue the wars and tax breaks to the 1%?

[Spag]

Under a static analysis, repealing the Bush tax cuts would only raise $70 billion per year and we have a $3.7 trillion dollar budget.

Maybe someone can explain how that drop in the bucket in terms of increased revenues is a viable economic plan to get us out of the malaise. That is the centerpiece of Obama's economic agenda.

"If only the rich paid more taxes, I'd have a job" or "If only the rich paid more taxes, my wages would go up" are moronic sentiments, but apparently that's the entire Democratic economic recovery package. It sure isn't based on raising taxes to cut the deficit considering the revenues would be miniscule and Obama would spend all of them anyway.

Also, Andrew is clearly not in the 5.3 million who aren't better off:

"According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, back in January 2009 when Barack Obama was sworn in, there were 2.6 million people unemployed for more than 6 months. By June 2012, the ranks of the long-term jobless soared more than 100 percent to 5.3 million."

Unemployment rate September 2008: 6.1%
Unemployment rate now: 8.3%

And although I know that the fact checkers have gone on vacation, the Democratic claim that Obama has created 4.5 million jobs is absolutely false. 4.316 million jobs were lost in the first 13 months of Obama's presidency. Since he took office, 4 million net jobs have been added back. So there has still been a net loss of jobs under Obama.

Applying the Democrat theory of counting job increases, Obama could fire everyone in the government for one day, higher them back the next day and then count the rehire as "job creation".

[Account Deleted]

Great graphic here that relates to justcorbly's point about wage stagnation. The graphic plots the correlation of productivity gains over time to wage increases and the disconnect that began about the time of NAFTA and globalized job markets.

[Kim]

How do you revive the purchasing power of the middle class, when trillions of dollars(demand)were sucked out of this economy from the housing bubble bursting?

That demand ain't coming back.

[cheripickr(worst person on the internet)]

Great graphic here Regarding "but yeah, we're better off than we were in the fall of 2008."
Looks like we're still a few mill in the hole to me depending on what point in the fall 2008 you want to use for comparison.

[Andrew Brod]

"The Democratic claim that Obama has created 4.5 million jobs is absolutely false. 4.316 million jobs were lost in the first 13 months of Obama's presidency. Since he took office, 4 million net jobs have been added back. So there has still been a net loss of jobs under Obama."

Spag got the numbers right. Yes, if the comparison is to January 2009, the height of the worst recession since the Great Depression, then payroll employment is actually lower now, by a little over 300K.

Of course Obama was inaugurated during a deep recession, and employment declines always continue beyond the end of the recession. If we're going to blame Obama for the recession he inherited, fine. But we should be clear that this is what we're doing.

If the comparison is to February 2010, when employment bottomed out, 4 million jobs have indeed been created over 29 months. Therefore, the claim of 4.5 million is false, but only because the true number is a half-million less.

Now, I wonder how Bush II did on a similar basis? If we compare employment when he left office to when it bottomed out after the 2001 recession, we see that 3.7 million jobs were created over 65 months. Now, the last year or so was during recession, but omitting recession years that come at the end of a presidential term seems less reasonable than omitting ones at the beginning. If the U.S. economy were to wheel back into recession now, I doubt that Spag would refuse to count them against Obama.

[Ed Cone]

Stolen from another blog: Using the unemployment numbers from late 2008 as the basis of comparison is like the old joke about falling off a tall building and saying in mid-air that it's not bad so far.

[Andrew Brod]

Perhaps it makes sense to look at the same number of months. July (August data are coming up on Friday) was 29 months since employment bottomed out, and Obama can claim credit for creating 4 million jobs in that time. If we look at the same 29 months during Bush's presidency, it's higher, about 5.3 million.

But note that the big drag on employment during this recovery has been government layoffs. If we look at private-sector employment only, the 29-month comparison is 4.5 million for Obama vs. 5.0 million for Bush. Private-sector job creation under Bush was stronger than for the comparable period under Obama. But the numbers are close enough that it's hard to justify calling Obama a job-killer but Bush a job-creator.

[Andrew Brod]

I heard this analogy recently: Asking people whether they're better off now than they were four years ago is like arriving at a fire scene and asking the homeowner whether she's better off than she was before the fire. She's not. But she's definitely better off than if the fire hadn't been put out. The tail end of the Bush administration (TARP I) and the beginning of the Obama administration (ARRA, TARP II) put the fire out.

[cheripickr(worst person on the internet)]

"But the numbers are close enough that it's hard to justify calling Obama a job-killer but Bush a job-creator." And if you will look back, nobody in this thread did, until your statistical selectivity sought to create the equal but opposite impression. Ed opined that comparison just wasn't that relevant to our current choices. Sam was willing consider both president's culpable and that it really didn't matter going forward as well. Your politically driven creative license with statistics and economics have become so easy to expose it's not even fun anymore. I can literally do it between procedures.

[Andrew Brod]

Oh good. It's CP, who never snarks.

Statistical selectivity? I'm the one who isn't doing that. In any case, as any honest reader can verify, it wasn't I who introduced the Obama-not-job-creator meme here. And I do believe I've heard claims like that outside of this thread.

[formerly gt]

Well, the world is certainly a much more dangerous place than it was 4 years ago.

Obama keeps saying things like the Iranians possessing a nuclear bomb is unacceptable. but he appears all too willing to accept it - no?

The change he championed in Egypt is turning very, very ugly. remember how candidate Obama slammed Bush for not achieving an egyptian/israeli peace deal? Now egypt/israeli relations are at their lowest point in the past 35 years.

Syria is a bloody mess. The administration lacks a cogent policy there as they do in the rest of the middle east.

Afghanistan, which candidate Obama proclaimed was the "right war" is lost. Obama's surge was more like a fizzle. What will we achieve by staying to 2014?

We cannot be certain what type of world leader Romney would be, but it's hard to imagine that he could be more inept than Obama.

[Spag]

@ Ed - Andrew introduced the late 2008 numbers, not me.

@ Andrew- Bush isn't on the ballot, is he? If he was, I would point out that the average unemployment rate under Bush - even if you added all of the job losses through June 2009 (six months into the Obama administration) to the Bush resume, his average unemployment rate would be 5.4% compared to 9.3% under Obama from June 2009 to the present.

"If we're going to blame Obama for the recession he inherited, fine. But we should be clear that this is what we're doing." That's a false narrative and a conflation. Nobody is blaming Obama for the recession, but that doesn't make his claim about job creation any more truthful.

If you lose jobs under your watch, and then gain some of them back they aren't "new" jobs. If you gain all of them back, then you merely broke even.

[Spag]

Part of the point in introducing the "Obama-not-job-creator meme" was to fact-check the oft-repeated claim that Obama created 4.5 million new jobs. You all remember fact checking? (spoken like "you all remember laughter?" from "Song Remains The Same").

[ZOSO]

I do

[Andrew Brod]

I guess the point is the meaning of "under one's watch." If I'm named the new fire chief in the middle of a big fire, I don't think it makes sense to count that conflagration as being "on my watch." I'd say we should wait until that one's put out before we start counting "my" fires. But other people will reckon that differently.

[Spag]

How long should people give the new fire chief to put out the fire and then start rebuilding? Using your analogy, Obama deserves no credit for killing Bin Laden because that mission started under Bush. Kind of like the old fire chief giving the new fire chief a really powerful hose.

I question if this is really the standard that you want to adopt. Bush got blamed for everything that happened during his term, but you want to give Obama an excuse even four years later. "Blame Bush" was what Obama ran on last time as the justification for "Hope and Change".

[HRH]

C'mon Spag. Your guy wanted to keep the war machine going. Getting OBL wasn't a top priority and you know that. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4PGmnz5Ow-o

[bubba]

"I can literally do it between procedures."

Perhaps Arnold needs your help removing a particularly swelled object causing some blockage.

[Spag]

"You didn't build that. Somebody else made that happen".

Kind of takes on a whole new meaning.

[polifrog]

I don't know, but watching unAmercan, godless antisemites replay the passing of "ObamaCare" on the DNC floor is a riot.

[Andrew Brod]

Well, there is a difference between Bush and Obama. The former didn't have an all-out mobilization of the opposition from Day One of his administration.

So I agree that it's taken Fire Chief Obama a long time to put out this fire. Too long. But it would have been nice if half of the firefighters hadn't been in back of the building keeping the fire going.

[Dave Ribar]

Andy:

It wasn't half the firemen in the back of the station. It was a minority of firemen who parked their cars in front of the firehouse doors.

[formerly gt]

"The former didn't have an all-out mobilization of the opposition from Day One of his administration."

In addition to the executive, The dems controlled the house and the senate from January 2009 - January 2011. And they still control the senate.

Obama has failed. blame it on whoever you want. but the bottom line is that he failed according to the standards he set at the beginning of his administration. own it.

[Andrew Brod]

Your mastery of how Congress works is underwhelming.

But okay, maybe Obama has failed. I actually agree with that in a lot of respects. But it's disingenuous to ask Democrats to "own it" when a substantial part of what's happened since January 2009 was the work of Republicans. Whatever one thinks of the patriotism or constructiveness of the Republican approach, it was a brilliant political strategy.

In other words, own it.

[scharrison]

"The change he championed in Egypt is turning very, very ugly."

Since Egypt hasn't suffered a military massacre or a sectarian bloodbath, I'm assuming you're referring to the Muslim Brotherhood's electoral success when you reference the ugly. It's called Democracy, gt.

Unless you're rooting for the military to succeed in stifling the will of the people. Which (of course) would not be Democracy.

[Andrew Brod]

I caught some of the Big Dog's speech last night. He made a claim of 4.5 million private-sector jobs gained under Obama. I said, aha. Is that the claim that Spag called "absolutely false"? I don't if Dems have been including the qualifier "private-sector" as Clinton did, but if they didn't, then yes, they were wrong by a bit. If they did include it, they were right on the money.

[Spag]

In football, when the quarterback is sacked for a 10 yard loss he doesn't get credit for 10 yards if he gains the yards back on the next play.

This is what Andrew, Obama & Co. are expecting the public to buy. Obama gets sacked for a 10 yard loss at the 50 yard line, passes for 11 yards on the next play and then claims that he has gained 11 yards even though the ball has actually only moved 1 net yard.

[Andrew Brod]

Cool story. But now a more relevant one: If the quarterback is sacked for a 10-yard loss and is replaced by one who passes for an 11-yard gain on the next play, then yes, the second quarterback certainly gets credit for that. The team has only netted a 1-yard gain, but the second quarterback has obviously done some good.

Blame the second quarterback for the first quarterback's sack if you wish. But I think a lot of voters will see through that.

[formerly gt]

"Cool story. But now a more relevant one"

But, Obama's supposed to be the coach, not the QB.

You're like the fan who blames the owners and everyone else for the team's losing season. if the owner had just spent more the team would have won. if the star player hadn't been injured, they'd have won. if the officials weren't out to get us, the team would've won. if it hadn't rained, the team would've won. at the end of the day, the team still had a miserable, losing season.

that's why Truman had the "The Buck Stops Here" sign on his desk. That's why i say "own it".

[cheripickr (AKA worst person on the internet)]

Andy, by all means, please run Obama's re-election campaign on a platform of blaming Bush for Obama's record 4 years later. Surely voters won't see through that.

[polifrog]

Obama is a defined quantity this election... and it is bad.

[Spag]

Obama was dealt some crappy cards, there is no doubt about that. Perhaps he should have been smart enough to realize the task that was ahead of him when he was out there claiming to be the second coming with the power to stop the seas from rising and "heal the world". HE was the one who was supposed to be so smart and said that if he didn't fix it within THREE years, he would be a one term president. Now he has Clinton and his surrogates out there arguing that people haven't been patient enough? That poor Obama just didn't realize how bad it really was when he was talking all of that fanciful, glorious shit?

Logically this means that his proposed fixes from the 2008 campaign weren't up to the task, so where is plan B and why hasn't he started it yet (I know, Republicans..)?

Four years later and he hasn't done much at all to fix the crappy hand he was dealt and his magical powers have clearly been exposed to be a sham. What is left is bitter disappointment and the realization that his touted abilities were way overstated, and his incompetence far more reaching than the "fairy tale" (Clinton's words) ever exposed.

[bubba]

Joel Pollak:

" 'Yes We Can' became 'No One Could Have' – Americans should not, Clinton urged, be disappointed in President Obama for failing to achieve the great things he promised in his soaring speeches–or even the bare minimum that we had expected. It was never actually possible, given the state the country had been in. 'No president–not me or any of my predecessors could have repaired all the damage in just four years,' Clinton said.

That excuse is not only an acknowledgement of failure, but an admission of fraud. If he had not promised to do more, and to be more, than any other politician, Barack Obama would not only have lost the election in 2008–he would also have lost the primary to his rival, Hillary Clinton.At the time, Bill called Obama’s rhetoric what it was: a 'fairy tale.' Today, Clinton is a willing accomplice to Obama’s bait-and-switch confidence game."

[Andrew Brod]

"Andy, by all means, please run Obama's re-election campaign on a platform of blaming Bush for Obama's record 4 years later. Surely voters won't see through that."

Perhaps I should note that I don't run campaigns. I just observe them.

Second, while it's kind of you to rephrase my point, this isn't about "blaming Bush" but instead about noting that Obama was inaugurated in the middle of the worst recession since the Great Depression. It's not about blaming Bush but it is about explaining Obama.

But you can make it about Bush if you'd like.

As for what voters will and won't see through, we'll find out in November. Right now a little less than half of them agree with you, and approximately the same proportion think you're full of it. The fight is for the remaining few percent.

[Andrew Brod]

"But, Obama's supposed to be the coach, not the QB."

Complain to Spag. I just adapted his metaphor.

"You're like the fan who blames the owners and everyone else for the team's losing season."

Actually, I'm like the fan who actually understands sports.

[cheripickr (AKA worst person on the internet)]

Andy, could you get a new picture? Your head has expanded beyond the confines of the little box that strains to contain it

[bubba]

"Actually, I'm like the fan who actually understands sports."

....but not like the investor who actually knows how to read stock volume charts.

[Andrew Brod]

Snarking is bad when people other than CP do it.

[Spag]

"Actually, I'm like the fan who actually understands sports."

Huh?

Let's expand on Andy's knowledge.

The first quarterback gets sacked two times in a row and loses 5 yards on each play. He is taken out of the game with the ball on his own 30. The second quarterback comes in and he gets sacked three times in a row so the ball is now on the 15. He then completes a few passes and moves the ball 10 yards to the 25.

Not only is the team still in a worse position on the field than when quarterback 2 started playing, he actually lost more yardage than quarterback 1. He now claims he deserves credit for regaining some of the yards previously lost in his first few plays, the secondary theme being "if quarterback 3 was playing, we would have lost even more yards".

Blame Bush? Who signed Glass-Steagall? William Jefferson Clinton.

Blame the tax cuts? Between 1982 and 2007 there were nearly 46 million jobs created- and Clinton's own top tax rates were lower than the first six years of Reagan's term. Prior to Reagan, the top rate was 70% or more for decades. Not only were all of those jobs created during the lower rates under Reagan-Bush-Clinton-Bush, the treasury took in more revenue every year except during periods of recession, so tax cuts aren't the cause of the deficit either. The top tax rate hasn't changed since 2003- and it wasn't until 2003 that we started gaining jobs again following the 2000-2001 recession. The decline in employment didn't start until April of 2007- and ANY gains claimed by Obama have occurred under the same tax rates. Tax rates aren't the problem, yet raising taxes is the central theme of the Obama economic program. There is no causal relationship between the shitty economy and the tax rates.