It’s time to admit something: The economy is not recovering. It is, if anything, unrecovering.
We’ve added an average of 119,000 jobs a month since January. That’s better than the 78,000 new jobs the economy averaged per month in 2010. But it’s barely enough to keep up with population growth. It’s not nearly enough to cut into the unemployment rate. And over the past three months, it has fallen to 96,000 per month.
Ezra Klein
Ezra Klein is the editor of Wonkblog and a columnist at the Washington Post, as well as a contributor to MSNBC and Bloomberg. His work focuses on domestic and economic policymaking, as well as the political system that’s constantly screwing it up. He really likes graphs, and is on Twitter, Google+ and Facebook. E-mail him here.
According to Macroeconomic Advisers, growth for the rest of the year is tracking at about 2.4 percent — not nearly enough to bring down the unemployment rate. That’s down from estimates that we would grow by more than 3 percent this year. Forecasters uniformly believe that another recession, perhaps driven by events in Europe, is a real possibility. And new data out of the Census Bureau show that median incomes have fallen by almost 10 percent over the past three years.
But why? For the past few months, I have been pestering every economist and economic policymaker I can think of with the same question: Could the recovery have been substantially different? Could unemployment today be substantially lower, growth substantially quicker, incomes substantially higher?
The result of my inquiries appeared in Sunday’s Washington Post and is available online. At almost 7,000 words, it’s a hefty piece. But the point of it was to better convey the tough decisions, hard tradeoffs and incomplete information that defined the policy process. In this column, I’ll relay some of my conclusions.
Let’s begin with the stimulus. It needed to be bigger. But there were two problems with bigger: Congress wouldn’t have gone for it, and the administration probably couldn’t have spent it effectively. Tax cuts, which can be done quickly and at any size, aren’t very stimulative because they get saved rather than spent. And infrastructure investment, which is very stimulative, can’t be ramped up quickly.
But it could have been longer. The stimulus was a two-year shot, and it was too small even before we knew that the recession was larger than it initially appeared. The administration wrongly figured that if it needed more, Congress would be happy to comply. That was a costly miscalculation.
If the White House had better understood the likely length of the recession and designed the stimulus funds to be spent over four years, it could have included a larger and smarter infrastructure component and tied the size and duration of the tax cuts, unemployment benefits and state and local aid to the unemployment rate.
In all likelihood, however, Congress would have objected to setting fiscal policy for 2012 in 2009. Waging and losing a battle over the structure of the stimulus might have helped President Obama shift blame for the country’s current condition when the stimulus that did pass proved inadequate, but such rhetorical victories are often lost on a public that doesn’t check its current opinions against past press releases.
Housing is a clearer case of the administration failing to get anything near the boundaries of the possible. No one I spoke to inside the administration is happy with how its housing policies turned out. In this area, the two clear missed opportunities were the administration’s failure to move quickly in appointing a friendlier regulator to lead Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac — it didn’t nominate anyone until November 2010, by which time emboldened Republicans were filibustering Obama’s nominees — and to push legislation allowing bankruptcy judges to reduce mortgage principal. Together, the two moves could have led to more refinancing for underwater homeowners and more recourse for bankrupt homeowners.
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