When President Obama pitched his first stimulus, to the tune of $787,000,000,000.00, his administration famously claimed that such massive deficit spending was necessary to keep unemployment from reaching 8 percent and then to bring it below 7 percent by mid-2011. Yet for the past 28 months — since the recession ended in June 2009 and the “recovery” began — unemployment has been at or above 9 percent 26 times. (And in the two months that it didn’t hit 9 percent, when it was 8.9 in February and 8.8 percent in March, it rounded to 9 percent.)

Such continuously high unemployment is a central aspect of the declining standard of living for middle class Americans in the Obama era. During the recession that Obama (mostly) inherited, the real median income of American households fell 3.2 percent. During the “recovery” over which Obama has presided, the real median income of American households has fallen an additional 6.7 percent. In other words, the typical American household’s real income has declined more than twice as much during Obama’s “recovery” as during the recession itself — dropping $3,609 per household, so far, during the “recovery.”