The Obama Recovery Has Been Miles Better Than the Bush Recovery

[applegrove]

The Obama Recovery Has Been Miles Better Than the Bush Recovery

by Kevin Drum at Mother Jones

http://www.motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2014/12/obama-recovery-has-been-miles-better-bush-recovery

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Do you see what happened? The Bush recovery looks a bit healthier and the Obama recovery looks a bit weaker. Why? Because we added government jobs. Bush got a nice tailwind from increased hiring at the state and federal level. Obama, conversely, was sailing into heavy headwinds because he inherited a worse recession. States cut employment sharply—partly because they had to and partly because Republican governors saw the recession as an opportunity to slash the size of government—and Congress was unwilling to help them out in any kind of serious way.

This is obviously not a story that conservatives are especially likely to highlight. But there's not much question about it. Bush benefited not just from a historic housing bubble, but from big increases in government spending and government employment. But even at that his recovery was anemic. Obama had no such help. He had to fight not just a historic housing bust, but big drops in both government spending and government employment. Despite that, his recovery outperformed Bush's by a wide margin.

There are, of course, plenty of caveats to all this. First of all, the labor force participation rate has been shrinking ever since 2000, and that's obviously not the fault of either Bush or Obama. It's a secular trend. Second, the absolute size of the labor force started out smaller in 2001 than in 2010, but it grew during the Bush recovery, which makes his trend line look worse. Its growth has been pretty sluggish during the Obama recovery as people have dropped out of the labor force, which makes his trend line look better. These are the kinds of things that make simple comparisons between administrations so hard. And as Krugman points out, it's unclear just how much economic policy from either administration really affected their respective recoveries anyway:

I would argue that in some ways the depth of the preceding slump set the stage for a faster recovery. But the point is that the usual suspects have been using the alleged uniquely poor performance under Obama to claim uniquely bad policies, or bad attitude, or something. And if that’s the game they want to play, they have just scored an impressive own goal.


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