Still an Economy Election

The facts--just the facts:

Fix this economy - NYPOST.com: "Bill Clinton stumbled into the truth about the US economy recently when he conceded that Mitt Romney is right, “It is true, we’re not fixed.” During the more than three-year Obama recovery, we’ve recovered only 4.8 million private-sector jobs of the 8.9 million lost in the Great Recession. At the current pace of job creation the past two years (and assuming labor force participation stays constant), the economy won’t return to the Bush low of 4.4 percent unemployment for nine more years. The current level of private-sector jobs remains nearly 13 million below where it would be if the labor market were back to normal and creating jobs at what economists call a “trend recovery.” And what kind of recovery is it when incomes decline faster than during the preceding downturn? The Great Recession never ended, not really. It just morphed into the Long Recession. So things are most definitely not fixed. And in some ways, they’re getting worse. The United States now ranks seventh of 144 nations in the World Economic Forum competitiveness rankings. In 2008, it was first. Fewer new firms are being formed today than two years ago when the recession ended, according to a Hudson Institute study. US government publicly held debt as a share of GDP was 41 percent in 2008; it’s projected to be 76 percent next year — and, under the most recent Obama budget, it’ll more or less stay at that historically high level for another decade."

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