It is said that the problem with the younger generation — any younger generation — is that it has not read the minutes of the last meeting. Barack Obama, forever young, has convenient memory loss: It serves his ideology. His amnesia concerning the policies that produced the robust recovery from the more severe (measured by its 10.8 percent unemployment rate) recession of 1981-82 has produced policies that have resulted in 0.1 percent economic growth in 2014's first quarter — the 56th, 57th and 58th months of the recovery from the recession that began in December 2007.
June begins the sixth year of the anemic recovery from the 18-month recession. Even if what Obama's administration calls "historically severe" winter weather reduced GDP growth by up to 1.4 percentage points, growth of 1.5 percent would still be grotesque.
America has a continental market, a reasonably educated and remarkably — considering the incentives for not working — industrious population, an increasingly (because of declining private-sector unionization) flexible labor market, an efficient financial system, extraordinary research universities to fuel innovation and astonishing energy abundance. Yet the recovery's two best growth years (2.5 percent in 2010 and 2.8 percent in 2012) are satisfactory only when compared to 2011 and 2013 (1.8 and 1.9, respectively).