In God We Trust

Shrinkage: Economists are writing off the sharp 2.9% drop in first-quarter GDP as a temporary contraction. Maybe. What isn't temporary is President Obama's massively subpar growth record over the past five years.

When the Commerce Department said two months ago the economy had eked out a 0.1% gain in the first quarter, the White House and various economists said growth would have been higher if not for the bitter winter. When Commerce revised that number down to -1% in May, the same crowd again blamed Jack Frost.

Now that it turns out the economy contracted 2.9% in the first three months of the year — the largest drop since 2009 and the sharpest downward revision in the government's history of making such estimates — everyone says "no biggie." These are, you see, backward-looking numbers; all signs point to growth ahead.

We've heard this "prosperity is just around the corner" promise countless times since President Obama took office, only to see it vanish once the corner is turned. The bigger problem is that Obama has set the country on what appears to be a permanently lower growth track.

Here's the grim reality:

In the nearly five years since the Obama recovery started — just months into Obama's first term — real gross domestic product has increased only 10.2%. That's less than half the average growth rate for every other economic recovery since World War II, and almost a third less than the pace set during the Reagan recovery.

Looked at in dollar terms, if the Obama recovery had merely been average, GDP today would be $1.6 trillion bigger than it is. If growth had kept pace with the Reagan recovery, GDP would be $2.2 trillion bigger.

The picture is equally dismal on jobs. Obama says more than 8 million have been created since early 2010 — when employment hit rock bottom — but he fails to note that the working-age population climbed almost exactly that amount since then, which is why the worker-to-population ratio remains stuck at three-decade lows.

If the job market under Obama had kept pace with the average postwar recovery, 7.8 million more people would have jobs today. Had it kept pace with the Reagan recovery, 13.7 million more Americans would be gainfully employed.

Even George W. Bush has a better record on jobs than Obama, when you compare apples to apples. By this point in the Bush recovery, unemployment was down to 5%; today, it's 6.3%.

That's still being unfair to Bush, given that millions dropped out of the labor force under Obama, and so aren't counted as unemployed. If you control for this, the jobless rate under Obama today would be 10.9%.

Prosperity may indeed be around the corner. But that corner isn't likely to arrive until after we get a new economic leadership team in place.