Politics

Obamanomics Fail: American Incomes Fell By Twice As Much During Obama ‘Recovery’ Than During ‘Recession’

Obamanomics Fail: American Incomes Fell By Twice As Much During Obama ‘Recovery’ Than During ‘Recession’

The Weekly Standard Blog reports on another failure of the Obama economic policy. According to new research, Obama’s attempt to staunch the “income gap” has caused the average income Americans to fall at a much greater rate during his “recovery” than what he constantly touts as, “the greatest recession since the Great Depression.”

New estimates derived from the Census Bureau’s Current Population Survey by Sentier Research indicate that the real (inflation-adjusted) median annual household income in America has fallen by 4.4 percent during the “recovery,” after having fallen by 1.8 during the recession.  During the recession, the median American household income fell by $1,002 (from $55,480 to $54,478). During the recovery—that is, from the officially defined end of the recession (in June 2009) to the most recent month for which figures are available (June 2013)—the median American household income has fallen by $2,380 (from $54,478 to $52,098).  So the typical American household is making almost $2,400 less per year (in constant 2013 dollars) than it was four years ago, when the Obama “recovery” began.

Actually, the disparity is more than twice as much, approaching two and a half times as much.

Let’s take the liberal assumption that income inequality is a measure that should be considered as a measure of success of governance, and that the government should be concerned with lessening it, even at the expense of average income growth.

How did Obama do there? Awful:

Research by University of California economist Emmanuel Saez shows that since the Obama recovery started in June 2009, the average income of the top 1% grew 11.2% in real terms through 2011.

 The bottom 99%, in contrast, saw their incomes shrink by 0.4%.

As a result, 121% of the gains in real income during Obama’s recovery have gone to the top 1%. By comparison, the top 1% captured 65% of income gains during the Bush expansion of 2002-07, and 45% of the gains under Clinton’s expansion in the 1990s.

So if the “recovery” fails by the conservative standard of simply raising wealth and prosperity, and it fails by the liberal measure of redistribution of income from the top to the bottom, what is left to credit Obama with?

Nothing – which is exactly why he spends all his time blaming congress for his failures.