The Unheralded Economic Miracle

By Taylor Lincoln

You wouldn't know it from the press clippings, but we may have been witness to the miraculous economic performance ever over the last five years. Yes, the last five years, the ones everyone has been griping about that have left the president's approval numbers on life support.

On Friday, the Bureau of Labor Statistics announced that the economy added 192,000 jobs in March while the number of people entering the workforce surged by a half million people. These numbers bring the total number of jobs back to pre-2008 meltdown levels.

If you are keeping score at home, that's 49 straight months of job gains, not that such an accomplishment is worth noting ... unless the former administration's incessant bragging is a guide. "America has added jobs for a record 52 straight months, but jobs are now growing at a slower pace," President George W. Bush claimed in the early stanzas of his January 2008 State of the Union address. (In reality, BLS figures show W's actual streak was just 46 consecutive months and jobs were rapidly plummeting by the time he made his SOTU boast.)

But, while Bush's purported DiMaggio-esque streak was fueled by a housing bubble that kicked construction employment into overdrive and left Americans intoxicated with soaring home values, Obama's nothing-to-write-home-about 49-month expansion has occurred during the hangover from the Bush housing binge.

Consider that obstacles.

Manufacturing lost 2.3 million jobs during the recession. This sector has done surprisingly well since then, but only 500,000 manufacturing jobs have returned.

Residential construction's historical share of the U.S. economy is about 3.5 percent, according to the Center for Economic and Policy Research. By 2006, it was about 6 percent. During President Obama's first term, it hovered 2 percent.

Infrastructure: This chart shows that public infrastructure spending had fallen to a lower level than it had been any time in the past 20 years March 2013.

Public sector: When Obama was elected in November 2008, there were 23.1 million public sector employees in the United States, according to Bureau of Labor Statistics data. That number sunk to 20.5 million by July 2013. That's a loss of 2.6 million jobs. (The number has since rebounded to about 22.2 million, accorining to preliminary data through March 2014.)

Finally, there's the sluggish European economy, which has acted as a drag on the U.S. economy for years.

So, our economy might be a disaster. But it's the sort of disaster we can live with.