The indispensable John Merline at Investors
Business Daily plots the details of “The Recovery That Wasn’t” in
the graphic to the right:

Employment: By this point, the average job growth in the past 10
recoveries was 6.9%. Under Obama, jobs have grown by just 1.9%,
according to data from the Minneapolis
Federal Reserve….

GDP growth: The Obama recovery has also performed far worse than
average when it comes to GDP growth. After 11 quarters, the economy
is still only 6.8% bigger than it was when the recession ended. In
contrast, GDP was 16% bigger, on average, by this point in the
previous 10 recoveries, the Minneapolis Fed data show…

Had the Obama recovery tracked the average GDP growth in the 10
previous recoveries, the economy would be almost $1.2 trillion
bigger today.

Incomes: By the third year of the past five recoveries, real
median household incomes climbed an average 2.8%, according to
the Census
Bureau, which only has household income data back to 1967.

Whole piece here.

You know what comes next, right?

Protestations from the Obama side that this is all just proof
that recession/depression was so much worse than any of us knew
that it’s a goddamn great and good thing that Obama is helming the
ship of state because if it had been one of those idiot Republicans
like George W. Bush we wouldn’t have had bailouts and a stimulus
that was too small to really effect the economy – even smaller than

the $150 billion tax thingamajig that Bush tried in early 2008
that was really pathetic because we now know that even Obama’s $800
billion attempt was obviously too small christ it should have been
two or three or even four times bigger and for god’s sake can’t we
just prepare for
the alien invasion that Paul Krugman – he won a Nobel Prize so
just shut up already! – says will create enough of a multiplier
effect to finally restart the economy and screw the debt because
we’ll have thousands of years to pay that down, especially now that
thank Zardoz we’ve got universal health care that will be awesome
if the d-bags on the SCOTUS don’t FUBAR it and Dodd-Frank means
there won’t be any fraud or dumb lending!

And of course the Republicans will
counter with: See, none of this would have happened if we’d only
followed George W. Bush’s disastrous
big-government spending ways and expansion of major
entitlements and a defense buildup because sharia law is taking
over whole hamlets in Oklahoma and our plan
to increase annual spending over the next decade by just $1
trillion is so much better than the Prez’s to spend $2 trillion
more, especially after increasing federal outlays by 60 percent or
more over the previous decade when we controlled things is exactly
the tonic the economy needs right now! But seriously folks, what do
you expect when you let gay marriage happen? No economy can recover
from that!

Exit questions: Do you think the weak recovery primarily stems
from the severity of the recession that ended in 2009 or the
government’s attempts to ameliorate the recession? Does it worry
you more that Obama might be re-elected alongside a GOP Congress
(both House and Senate) or that Romney (who supported TARP, auto
bailouts, and stimulus) will be elected with a GOP Congress?