Voters to Obama: Things are worse than when you took over.
Obama to voters: We cannot go back; we must move forward.
Voters to Obama: Perhaps you misheard us; “back” is better than what we have now.
Obama to voters: No, I heard you. Welcome to the New Normal.
I’m sure some folks will quibble with the voters’ assessment in the first sentence. Of course, the unemployment rate when Obama took over was 7.6 percent. That number is skewed by a dramatic reduction in the size of the labor force (discouraged workers giving up and falling out of the statistics); the size of the labor force in January 2009 was 154,140,000; in June 2010 it was 153,741,000. Under the normal growth rate of 100,000 new workers joining the work force per month, the labor force should have been 155,840,000 workers. Nearly seven million people have been out of work for six months or more.
Foreclosure filings surpassed 3 million in 2008, reached 3.9 million in 2009, and we’re on pace for 3.3 million in 2010. The pace of single-family new-home sales is the slowest since they started gathering statistics in 1963.
The deficit jumped $166 billion . . . on June 30. All of the six biggest increases of the deficit have occurred in the past two years.
A plethora of economic indicators look ominous: commercial real estate, consumer-confidence surveys, mortgage applications, manufacturing production.
And despite the Obama administration’s claim that it hasn’t raised taxes — tell it to indoor tanning customers — state and local taxes have skyrocketed since January 2009: “Over the last two years, 36 out of 50 states have raised taxes or fees, according to data from the National Association of State Budget Officers. The combined tab comes to more than $25 billion.”
This isn’t even getting into the feds suing Arizona, the infuriating federal response to the oil spill, cap-and-trade fears in the auto industry, the business world’s irritation at being scapegoated, the public rejection and fury over the health-care bill . . .
Periodically you’ll see some Obama-administration defender or Democrat in Congress point to a modest improvement month-to-month. What they don’t seem to grasp is that, fairly or not, 2007 or 2008 (pre–Lehman Brothers, say) is the electorate’s concept of “normal.” And voters are disinclined to credit the administration for modest month-to-month improvements when the year-to-year conditions have gotten so much worse.