Recovery

Rebecca Shabad of The Hill reports:

Listen to the president, his staff, and his supporters and you might be ready to believe that the economy is on a rocket ride to prosperity.  More jobs, lower gas prices, increased consumer spending.  So now, at last, we can afford to do away with sequestration and other implements of austerity.…

What should be a recovery on steroids – after all, it has had six years to get in shape – is still not up to speed.  If there were as many people in the labor force now, as there were when President Obama came into office, the unemployment rate would be close to 10%.  And the spirit of…

Protesters gathered outside the Clinton Foundation in New York City to complain about "missing money" from the Haiti recovery effort from the 2010 earthquake:

Ben Casselman and Reuben Fischer-Baum of 538 have gone inside the numbers (as they say) of the economic recovery and their findings are not comforting.

Slow growth is bad for everyone.  Including the government, which depends (sort of) on tax revenues to do its job.  Now, as Kasia Klimasinska of Bloomberg reports:

Until housing picks up.  That, anyway, is the way Neil Irwin of the New York Times is reporting it:

Reports from the economic front, this week, have been discouraging.  Especially yesterday's revise in first quarter GDP to almost three percent negative growth.  A contraction, in other words.  Another one of those, on the back of that one, and we are officially in a recession. Yesterday, the…

Weekly first time unemployment claims came in almost exactly as expected (which, in itself, is sort of unexpected) at 312,000.  One thousand less than economists were predicting and 6,000 less than last week.  Which amounts to something like treading water.  We aren’t drowning, but we aren’t…

More evidence that the legs of the long economic recovery may be getting less wobbly.  First-time jobless claims fell, last week, to a seven-year low and beat, on the downside, economists’ predictions by a large margin.  (One sometimes thinks that the economists ought to pick a figure and stick…

But just how bad was the first quarter for the American economy?  Commerce Department GDP came in at .1 percent growth, which is treading water, but barely.  Speculation had the revised figures showing that the economy actually contracted and now, as Ben Leubsdorf of the Wall Street…

Politicians looking for work and calling themselves “Democrats” are being advised to avoid using the word “recovery.”  As the AP reports:

Cotten Timberlake at Bloomberg reports:

Rodrigo Campos at Reuters reports that:

Consumer confidence fell to 79.7 in September from last month's (revised 81.8). 

President Obama likes to talk about income inequality, but what matters far more is the actual income of the typical American.  And how has the typical American household income fared on Obama's watch?  Well, the economic "recovery" has now spanned an Olympiad, and during that time the typical…

The great recession may be behind us, but the damage has not been repaired.  As Michael A. Fletcher reports in the Washington Post:

The president, as Justin Sink of The Hill writes, will be giving some speeches in which he intends:

“Well, we’ve gone through a tough four years.”  That line from Tuesday night’s presidential debate wasn’t particularly surprising.  It was, after all, exactly what one would expect Mitt Romney to say about President Obama’s tenure in office.  What was surprising was that it wasn’t Romney who…

Americans must be wondering how much more of this “recovery” they can afford.  New figures from the Census Bureau’s Current Population Survey, compiled by Sentier Research, show that the typical American household’s real (inflation-adjusted) income has actually dropped 5.7 percent during the Obama…

The people who didn't build their small businesses seem to think so.  The Wall Street Journal reports:

New evidence suggests there’s a reason why this economic “recovery” hasn’t felt much like a recovery. Figures from the Census Bureau’s Current Population Survey, compiled by Sentier Research, show that the “recovery” has actually been harder on most Americans than the recession from which they’ve…

There is a very good reason why the White House – even with a generally complicit media – is having trouble persuading Americans that the stimulus spending is creating jobs: There seems to be an enormous disconnect between local economic development and creating net new jobs on a national basis.