That being said, saying “I took office after the worst of the private sector job losses had abated and still their numbers are off from where they were three years ago at the tail end of a recession” is not much of a credit to the administration either. (That being said, assuming a roughly linear pace for private sector job gains from their recent uptick in 2011, they’ll be poised to get to January 2009 levels about in time for the 2012 election. Say it with me: “Lost Decade”.)

We’ve been trumpeting this as much as we can at ReasonableViews.com. Our “Double Dip or Lost Decade” article focused on the blue line, pointing out that we are below where we were 11 years ago. There’s no period since the Great Depression when something like this was true. The key point in my mind is that the growth after the ’01 recession was so meager that it was wiped out entirely by the next recession. Add to this that wages are down in real terms and the stock market is down since 2000, and you have a disastrous decade. I suspect that most people don’t step back enough to realize how bad the last 11 years have been, and I think we need to explore and understand the issue before we can solve it.

Thanks,

Jim & Evan
http://bit.ly/sSCZjN