So, the National Bureau of Economic Research has officially declared The Great Recession over.
If President Obama were as politically brilliant as his most strident supporters keep telling us, he would publicly take the NBER, and the entire economics profession, to task for clinging to "neo-liberal" measures of economic performance that clearly have no relation to the day-to-day reality of us mere mortals.
If this is a recovery, I don’t need it or want it.
(From The Economic Collapse blog)
# 2. . . 2009 saw the largest single year increase in the U.S. poverty rate since the U.S. government began calculating poverty figures back in 1959.
#3 The U.S. poverty rate is now the third worst among the developed nations tracked by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development.
#4 According to the U.S. Department of Agriculture, on a year-over-year basis, household participation in the food stamp program has increased 20.28%.
#5 The number of Americans on food stamps surpassed 41 million for the first time ever in June.
#6 As of June, the number of Americans on food stamps had set a new all-time record for 19 consecutive months.
#9 One out of every seven mortgages in the United States was either delinquent or in foreclosure during the first quarter of 2010.
#11 The number of Americans receiving long-term unemployment benefits has risen over 60 percent in just the past year.
#13 Nationwide, bankruptcy filings rose 20 percent in the 12 month period ending June 30th.
#14 More than 25 percent of all Americans now have a credit score below 599.
#15 One out of every five children in the United States is now living in poverty.
And the polls so far are pretty clear that a not insignificant number of Americans are thinking the same way. Faced with this reality, why should anyone be surprised that so many potential Democratic voters say they will probably not show up at the voting booth on election day?
If President Obama actually could think outside the box, he would be assailing the reigning paradigm of neo-liberal economics which now tells us the recession is over. The Subcommittee on Investigations & Oversight of the House Committee on Science & Technology pointed the way two months ago, when it had a handful of heterodox economists address the issue of Building a Science of Economics for the Real World.
Instead, we get the President defending his current economics team, paragons of economic neo-liberalism all.
How many times will we repave the road of good intentions before we finally realize we really, really need to change the destination? And that is going to require overthrowing the reigning paradigm of elites' thinking on economics.