Timothy Noah thinks the answer is obvious, even looking at the graph above:
There can be little doubt that Americans are worse off, economically, than they were in 2008. Median household income has fallen since 2008, and (according to one study) it’s fallen even more steeply during the recovery than it did during the 2007-2009 recession. Back in 1980, Ronald Reagan tormented Jimmy Carter with the “misery index,” which was the unemployment rate plus the inflation rate. At the moment the misery index is 9.7 (8.3 percent unemployment plus 1.4 percent inflation), compared to 7.8 (7.8 percent unemployment plus 0 percent inflation) the month Obama took office. So by that venerable metric we’re worse off than we were four years ago. We just are.
The month after Obama took office, the unemployment rate was 8.3 percent; it's 8.3 percent now. Sticking him with the January number when he was president for only ten days of it seems silly to me (as, by the way, does the unemployment in his first year). But the difference is that in February 2009, we were losing 800,000 jobs a month; in July 2012, we're adding around 150,000 jobs a month over the past year, despite a huge drop in government employment. The stock market has made big gains – from around 6500 in the spring of 2009 to almost 13000 today, inflation is under control, and interest rates are at deep lows. We're out of the quagmire of Iraq and al Qaeda has been decimated. 30 million more people have potential access to health insurance. Yes, median household income is very meaningful – but it's not the only metric. Of course, we're better off. Steven Taylor adds:
Look, one can think that Obama’s policy were wrong and that other policies would have created more jobs, etc. And if one thinks that, then one should do one’s best to make that case. (Indeed, one of my criticisms of the Romney campaign is that they infer that something better could have been done without actually laying out an argument for what that might have looked like). However, what one cannot do is assert that the job situation is worse now than it was at the end of the Bush administration. Further, one cannot pretend (though many try anyway) that the trends were made worse by Obama policies.
Meanwhile, David Graham reiterates that the shedding of public-sector jobs has obscured the private-sector revival:
Government jobs are shrinking quickly — the government has fewer employees than it has for 45 years, and job losses in the public sector have been a consistent drag on the unemployment rate.
Of course, all this may be moot come Friday.
The Dish 