Writing for Commentary‘s “Contentions” blog, Peter Wehner notes that President Obama recently told Rolling Stone magazine about a simple way to judge the effectiveness of Republican economic ideas, as exemplified by the period from 2000 to 2008:
It wasn’t like we have to engage in some theoretical debate – we’ve got evidence of how it worked out. It did not work out well, and I think the American people understand that.
Wehner’s response?
So Obama wants a debate based not on theoretical claims but on empirical achievements.
Wonderful. Why don’t we accommodate the president?
Annual economic growth was three times higher under President Bush than under President Obama. Under Bush, the unemployment rate averaged 5.3 percent; under Obama, it has never been under 8 percent. In the wake of a recession that began roughly seven weeks after President Bush took office, America experienced six years of uninterrupted economic growth and a record 52 straight months of job creation that produced more than 8 million new jobs. We saw labor-productivity gains that averaged 2.5 percent annually — a rate that exceeds the averages of the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s. Real after-tax income per capita increased by more than 11 percent. And from 2000 to 2007, real GDP grew by more than 17 percent, a gain of nearly $2.1 trillion. As for the deficit, it fell to 1 percent of GDP ($162 billion) by 2007. Indeed, before the financial crisis of 2008 … Bush’s budget deficits were 0.6 percentage points below the historical average.
As for the Obama record, … President Obama has overseen the weakest recovery on record. He is on track to have the worst jobs record of any president in the modern era. The standard of living for Americans has fallen more dramatically during his presidency than during any since the government began recording it five decades ago. Unemployment has been above 8 percent for 40 consecutive months, the longest such stretch since the Great Depression. Home values are nearly 35 percent lower than they were five years ago. The United States has amassed more than $5 trillion in debt since January 2009, with the president having submitted four budgets with trillion-dollar-plus deficits. Prior to Obama, no president had submitted even a single budget with deficits in excess of a trillion dollars. In addition, government dependency, defined as the percentage of persons receiving one or more federal benefit payments, is the highest in American history. And a record 46 million Americans are now living in poverty.