In January 2009, when President Obama took office, the U.S. economy was hemorrhaging 800,000 jobs a month. The unemployment rate continued to rise during Obama’s tumultuous first year, peaking at 10 percent that October.

That feels like a long time ago. Today’s jobs report showed that the economy added 280,000 jobs in May, a record 63rd straight month of employment growth. The private sector has added 12.6 million jobs during that stretch, and unemployment is now 5.5 percent. Meanwhile, the housing market has bounced back, inflation has remained low, and the federal budget deficit has steadily decreased.

But there’s still a nagging sense of national disappointment about the economy, a widespread feeling that wages are too low, inequality is too extreme, growth is too sluggish, and the American Dream is slipping out of reach for the middle class. Obama’s approval rating is still below 50 percent, and Republican presidential candidates are all running against Obamanomics, denouncing the last six years as an era of public-sector overreach and private-sector stagnation. Jeb Bush argued this week that the economy has actually gotten worse on Obama’s watch.

Jason Furman, the chairman of White House Council of Economic Advisers and an Obama aide since the hope-and-change campaign of 2008, thinks that’s crazy. But as one of the primary architects of the massive stimulus package that most economists believe helped end the Great Recession--and most Americans believe was a pork-stuffed waste of money--he knows it's not an uncommon argument.

In an interview with POLITICO’s Michael Grunwald, Furman laid out the case for Obamanomics, arguing that the president hasn’t gotten enough credit for saving and improving the economy, that he’s delivering on his promises of hope and change.

Furman also discussed his problems with Republicans on economic and budget policy, the prospects of doing a tax deal with Paul Ryan, and his disagreement with his old boss Larry Summers about the future of economic growth. And he explained the next big ideas in Obamaworld and perhaps the Democratic Party—on immigration, on trade, and on a 21st-century education system that’s government-funded from the cradle until age 20.

MG: The Republican presidential candidates are running around saying the economy is terrible and everybody knows it, no matter what the numbers say. What would you say to them?

JF: The fact is, the economy has made a really remarkable recovery against the pretty tough odds that you face when you see the type of financial crisis we saw. If you look at past episodes of crises like this, the Great Depression being the most notable, you wouldn’t have thought that our unemployment rate six years after the crisis would be nearly back to where it was prior to the crisis, that our economy would be substantially larger than it was before the crisis, and that real wages would be rising for workers.

MG: There’s been a lot of talk of job-killing Obamacare, job-killing stimulus, job-killing financial regulations, job-killing energy regulations. Everything is job-killing. So how is it going on jobs?

JF: In 2014, we saw the fastest pace of job growth since the 1990s. And it’s actually even more impressive than just that stat would tell you, because the demographics now are more people hitting retirement years and retiring. And notwithstanding that, we had the fastest job growth we’ve had since the late 1990s. The unemployment rate was declining at a pace that it hadn’t since the 1980s, and the streak of job creation we’re on is the longest streak this country has ever had. So I don’t think anything in these data support the various Chicken Little stories we’ve heard over the years.

MG: So the obvious question: If things are so good, why do people feel so bad? It’s not just people who want to be the next president saying it’s hard out there.

JF: First of all, people are more confident and more optimistic today than they have been at any point in time since the financial crisis…But people have also been struggling with decades of subpar wage growth, with decades of increasing inequality, and that problem has not been solved.

MG: You hear from Hillary and from the other Democrats running that we’ve lost the middle class in the country. Is that true, and what is the state of the middle class? Is it as terrible as everyone says?

JF: I wouldn’t say the middle class is worse off than 40 years ago. A lot of things have gotten better. The economy has generated gains. But those gains have been very unequally divided, and have come slower than in previous decades. So what we can do to expand the economy more quickly and better connect those gains with the middle class has been essential to the president’s agenda. That’s what he’s still pushing for.

MG: So what have you done for the middle class today for the last six years and has it helped?

JF: Rescuing the economy from a second Great Depression, that helped everyone in our country.

MG: Yeah, well, what have you done for us lately?

JF: Well, tax cuts for college, tax cuts for lower-income families with children, making the middle-class tax cuts permanent to give families more certainty, and paying for all of that with higher taxes on high-income households that returned to what they were in the 1990s. In terms of education, attending college is a key step to the middle class. There’s a lot of concern about student loans, that’s something that we’re continuing to work through, but the really big step there is income-based repayment for loans, making sure that no one has to pay back more than 10 percent of their income in interest payments. A whole bunch of other steps. Going forward, a lot of what we’re trying to do is help more families participate in the workforce. So: expanded child care, tax benefits for secondary earners, more flexible workplaces.

MG: Republicans want to repeal Obamacare, saying it will create a big economic boon.

JF: That’s another place where you’ve seen extraordinary unsung success. Health cost growth is at the lowest rate it’s been in 50 years. Health costs have consistently outpaced inflation for as long as we’ve measured them, but now they’re basically in line with inflation. Premium growth has slowed from double digits a decade ago to tied for the lowest on record now. A whole lot of things have caused that, but there’s no doubt in my mind that the Affordable Care Act has contributed to that.

MG: I saw a poll that said, I think, 75 percent of Americans think the deficit is increasing. Somehow people aren’t getting the message that it’s actually decreasing. Why is that?

JF: I think the most important thing is that everyone opens up POLITICO, reads this interview, and finds out that the deficit was 9.8 percent of GDP In 2009, and last year was 2.8 percent of GDP. It’s fallen by 70 percent as a share of the economy. What’s particularly important is it’s not just a temporary thing. If you look at the Congressional Budget Office’s estimate of the deficit over the next 25 years and the next 75 years, they’re considerably smaller than what they thought it was going to be five years ago. And a big part of that change is the steps we’ve taken to slow the growth of health care [costs], but also higher taxes on high-income households.

MG: But nobody seems to know that. Is this a failure of the economic advisers to the president? Is the president not such a great communicator after all?

JF: I’ve spent a lot of time looking at the deficit numbers. I haven’t spent much time looking at polls on what people think about the deficit. Our job is taking steps to bring it down, and it’s down. It’s still an issue over the long run, but a much less pressing issue than it has been.

MG: Ben White had an interesting piece about how the job prospects for kids graduating from school today aren’t what they were 30 years ago. He wrote the job market is certainly better than six years ago, but it basically sucks. And meanwhile, college is getting so expensive. Is this a failure by you guys?

JF: First of all, we shouldn’t lose the big picture for the weeds. The unemployment rate for college graduates is much lower than for non-college graduates. Wages are much higher. College remains one of the best tickets to the middle class, to a more secure economic future. Some of the issues we’ve seen are, first of all, we’ve seen a very rapid growth in college costs. A lot of that is in the for-profit sector, where frankly, quality can be pretty uneven. That’s one of the reasons why we’ve regulated in that particular area, put in place rules to get those schools to up their game.

MG: Have they yet?

JF: Well, you’ve seen big changes in that sector already, even in anticipation that the rules are coming, as a lot of those programs are trying to improve themselves. But addressing that sector through regulations is going to be an important step. Another is the income-based repayment I was talking about for student loans.

MG: Let’s talk about what the president can do in his last year and a half. Trade seems to be the next thing on the docket. The left is very upset. What’s the response? How is this going to help people who are still struggling?

JF: I’d go back to my diagnosis of challenges we’ve had with incomes in the last 40 years. Those challenges have stemmed from inadequate productivity growth, inadequate sharing in that growth, and inadequate labor force participation. Trade helps address at least one of those, potentially more. It will make our economy more productive. Expand the economic pie more quickly. It also will help address the quality of jobs we’ve been struggling with for a long time. Jobs in export-intensive industries pay up to 18 percent more than other jobs. The other thing is on the consumer side: trade doesn’t matter a lot to high-income households as consumers. High-income households aren’t consuming a lot of tradables. If you look at a middle-income household, if you look at a lower-income household, a lot of their purchasing power is actually dependent on trade. So it actually helps inequality in that way.

MG: We’ve talked about taxes a little bit. You guys have raised taxes at the very top, and you had some temporary tax cuts for the middle class in the stimulus and beyond. But most of them expire right when the presidency does. What’s going to be the legacy of this president on taxes?

JF: I am confident those tax cuts will be made permanent. It’s really important that they’re made permanent.

MG: Which one?

JF: The ones that you referred to as expiring. The tax credits for college, they will have been in place for eight years. I think it would be at anyone’s peril to raise taxes on 25 million households by an average of $1,000 a year. I think that is a lasting legacy.

MG: Congress let the payroll tax cuts expire, right?

JF: But this will be eight straight years of tax cuts. You have more and more Republicans claiming the Earned Income Tax Cut is the best way to deal with poverty and inequality. Well, here you have a good test of that. The EITC expansion is expiring at the end of 2017. Do you want to continue it or raise taxes?

MG: Well, Paul Ryan says the EITC is great. Why not expand it right now?

JF: We would love to work together on the next step. We’ve done a lot for families with children using the EITC. Families without children and non-custodial parents could be the next big set of gains. We’re really excited that Paul Ryan took exactly the same proposal the president put forth and put it forward himself. It’s something we’d love to work with him on.

MG: Have you talked to his people about it?

JF: We’ve certainly communicated.

MG: I mean, is there any chance of doing tax reform?

JF: I think business tax reform is an area where you see a decent amount of convergence, and it’s also a way to pay for infrastructure, which is something that is really critical to our economy. There are some changes you could make on the individual side, the EITC is an example, but less convergence there.

MG: On the budget, you have very different visions. You’ve been very unhappy with the sequester. Talk about the Republican vision for the budget. They have some ideas. Where would they bring us?

JF: If you maintain the sequester, that would be damaging to the economy in the short run because it would be fiscal contraction. Part of why the economy has picked up in the last couple years has been getting some of that behind us, some of the unnecessary austerity and the unnecessary brinksmanship. I think the bigger costs are actually in the long run. When you’re shortchanging research, when you’re shortchanging investment, when you’re shortchanging education, some of that will hurt the economy right away, some of that would be the reason our economy would grow more slowly in the future.

MG: I saw they want to repeal the estate tax, and presumably that’s for the very, very rich and very, very dead. To an economist, what’s the message of what they’re doing?

JF: I don’t know of any widely believed economic theory that says repealing the estate tax is good for the economy. Proponents of the estate tax tend not to make economic arguments, they tend to make moral arguments. As an economist you can’t prove any particular morality is right, but morality that centers around giving more to the top one-tenth of 1 percent while short changing the bottom 99.9 percent, to my mind, seems difficult to defend.

MG: George W. Bush wrote a book about 4 percent growth, saying, I guess, that would be a good thing. Jeb is talking about how we need more growth. Why don’t we have more growth?

JF: Anyone would agree with the proposition that we need more growth. More growth is always better. The question is what do you do to get more growth. Trade would help. Investment in infrastructure would help. Investment in education would help. Investment in research would help. A balanced plan to bring the deficit down in the medium term would help. A lot of things would help. So the important debate is not do we want more growth. The question is what can you do to get it? Just as an aside, people create a lot of confusion when they compare growth rates over different periods of time because they don’t adjust for certain obvious facts. Like the 1980s, for example, the working age population was growing quite quickly. Now, the working age population is actually shrinking slightly. That’s just a pure demographic fact. The baby boomers were going through their working years then, they’re entering their retirement years now. So those demographic facts will affect how you compare growth.

MG: You mentioned trade, infrastructure, education, research. Aren’t Republicans for all those things?

JF: You can’t be for infrastructure, research, and education if you’re also for the sequester—or cutting even deeper than the sequester.

MG: You know, your old boss, Larry Summers, has raised the idea that we may be in some sort of secular stagnation, a new normal, that this is as good as it gets. What do you think of that?

JF: I don’t think secular stagnation is a particularly useful description of the U.S. economy in the year 2015. We’ve seen the fastest improvements in the labor market that we’ve see in decades. I do agree that the U.S. is well served by more productivity growth, and we had a lot more productivity growth in the 50s and 60s than we’ve had since then. And we need to take it back a little closer to what we did then. Some of things we did in the 50s and 60s were things like the interstate highway system, those types of investments in infrastructure today would serve us well.

MG: Do you worry about the robots taking the jobs? When you go to CVS and you check out by yourself, the ATM, the tollbooth, you’re seeing all these jobs replaced by electronics and machinery.

JF: I certainly worry every time that machine starts beeping at me. But technology holds a lot of promise, in terms of increasing the size of the pie, and a lot of what we need to do is make sure people are equipped with the skills to benefit from that technology. I don’t think the robots will happen overnight. It’s not like tomorrow they’re all going to come in and take everyone’s jobs. If it’s a gradual process that’s spread over a period of time, and we make the right investments in education and training, I think it can be a real benefit for people and not something scary.

MG: What’s history going to say about this president on the economy?

JF: History is going to say he saved us from a second Great Depression, that he put in place a number of structural factors, including the slow growth of health care, a dramatic transformation in the energy sector, and changes in technology that put us in a better place for economic growth in the future.

MG: How about for the Republican Congress?

JF: I don’t think anyone is going to look very fondly on brinksmanship over the debt limit, appropriations bills, the government shutdown. Different people can have different opinions over the direction tax reform takes, but some of the unnecessary uncertainty, I don’t think anyone would defend.

MG: Is there a next big idea? We’ve talked about this in the past. With Obamacare, the welfare state is just about complete, or close to it. For proponents of the welfare state, what’s next?

JF: The big focus in education for the last 75 years has been public finance for ages 5-18. Expanding that in both directions: making preschool before age 5 available for all, and then making community college free for all—that takes you to beyond. If you include the president’s proposal for child care, basically instead of age 5-18, basically we’re looking at ages 0-20. We’re making significant investments in people. I think expanding education on those margins constitutes a really big, important idea….I also think immigration is quantitatively one of the largest things we can do for our economy. If you look at the estimates from the Congressional Budget Office, it would add $1.4 trillion to the size of the economy. And it would do that not just because you’re bring new workers in, but also because you’re increasing what economists call total factor productivity, both because you bring in high-skilled people with new ideas and new innovations, but also because you’re taking people here in the United States already, who face a lot of uncertainty, and giving them more of a certainty to go to the best job, to start a business, to make investments, to go to school, whatever it is to contribute to the economy as well.

MG: As the rational economist, you know the supply and demand curves. But then it all has to go through Washington, through the mess down the street. How has it changed your views about how policy works, and is there anything that can be done about it?

JF: There’s no doubt that Washington can be frustrating. I think everyone claims to agree that investing more in infrastructure is a good idea. The president has a smart, ambitious plan for a six-year reauthorization of the surface transportation program, and it’s something Congress has been unable to do. Then there are times where you see things come together in a bipartisan way that you may not have even expected and pleasantly surprise you. So the fix to the sustainable growth rate for Medicare was something—members had been kicking the can on that for six months at a time for a decade. They just came together and not only addressed it permanently, but they did it in a way that followed proposals, many of them that we had in the Affordable Care Act, that would provide greater rewards for quality, less incentive for volume, and integrating care rather than fragmenting care. They just did a smart reform to an important part of our health system. And that came together on a bipartisan basis.

MG: You worked in a Clinton administration once. Is that something you would do again?

JF: Starting January 21, 2017, I will do whatever my wife wants me to do. Government is not high up on the list of things she wants me to do.

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