Mort Zuckerman said he voted for Obama in 2008 which, I suppose, makes his magnum opus on the failed Obama economic policies all the more difficult to write. You will seldom see numbers like this put together in one narrative. The closest you’ll come is to those graphs I cribbed from the Zero Hedge blog the other day. Look at the post here.

But Zuckerman goes even beyond those shocking graphs. With great effect he compares our Great Recession to the Great Depression and finds current US productivity and job growth falling short of even the depression. I repeat:  even the depression. 

For the 80 percent of Americans born after World War II, this is their Depression. They have 5.5 million fewer jobs than at the recession’s start in 2008, despite the most stimulative fiscal and monetary policy in our history. Employment has been below the pre-recession peak for over 50 months. It’s the longest time since the Great Depression that payrolls have not made a new high. The 120,000 new jobs for March make no dent (and adjusted for the peculiarity of warm weather, the number of real net jobs created was 76,000); we need at least 125,000 jobs each month just to provide for new entrants in a rising population.

Discouraged workers dropping out of the labor force make the unemployment rate look fractionally better, but the 8.2 percent headline masks the misery. It is a reflection of the U-3 statistic, which counts only people who have applied for a job in the last four weeks. Among the jobless army, a staggering 42 percent of them are long-term unemployed, without jobs for six months or longer. Look instead at the more relevant U-6 statistic, which counts the number of people who have applied over the last six months. U-6 also includes those who are involuntarily working on a part-time basis. That U-6 unemployment is now in the range of 15 percent. Since 2008, some 3 million people have dropped out of the job market. If they hadn’t, the unemployment rate would be about 10.8 percent.

Hiring today is at about 70 percent of the 2006 level. Given the increase in unemployed totals, job seekers are only about one third as likely to find work as in 2006.
Compare that to the fabled Great Depression of the 1930s. In the three years after 1933, the economy rebounded with growth rates of 11 percent, 9 percent, and 13 percent. But in 2010, months into our recovery, growth was about 3 percent, followed by 1.7 percent growth in 2011. The rate for 2012 could be about 2 percent—below the 3.4 percent throughout the postwar period.

Two thirds of the job growth, he reports, is in the 55+ category. They can’t quit their jobs because their retirement income has become hollowed out by the financial crisis. Unfortunately for younger workers that means they’re crowded out. Cue Obama’s speeches on ‘sharing’ the pain and getting out of the labor force because, “at some point you have enough.” Soylent green comes next.

Small and medium businesses, Zuckerman notes, aren’t hiring because of the uncertainty of ObamaCare. He backs it up with two studies.

Obama likes to talk about income inequality but probably should keep his mouth closed about considering he’s responsible for its acceleration,

In fact, real personal disposable income per capita is lower now than it was in November 2006! And if you strip out government subsidies and assistance, real personal income is down even more from four years ago. This appears to be the first time since the 1930s that inflation-adjusted incomes of Americans have declined.

There’s more, but you need to know this: Obama promised a fundamental transformation in the US. This is what that looks like. Obama once lamented about the rapidly rising gas prices that he wanted them to go up but just not this fast. It is this way with the fundamental restructuring of our economy. He wanted it this redistributionism and its chaotic, impoverishing fallout, he just didn’t want it to happen this fast. When it’s this fast, people notice. He was hoping to forestall it till after November 2012. Sounds like old Mort decided to look at the Win/Loss record and call Obama what he is: a failure.