We're Not Feeling It

On Wednesday night, former president Bill Clinton assured us that nobody could have managed the Great Recession better than Barack Obama. He compared Obama’s tenure to the period between 1993 and 1996, when the economy was recovering but people were not yet feeling it. He assured us that, soon enough, we will feel this recovery.

It seems unlikely. In fact, the evidence shows that job growth has stalled during the Obama tenure, that the stall has been over a year in the making, and that the rate at which we are stuck is far too low to generate the kind of prosperity enjoyed in the mid-1980s and mid-1990s.