A number of people have asked me to respond to this Hubbard-Gramm piece on the Reagan recovery versus the Obama recovery, and why it proves that right-wing economics roolz.

But I already did respond. When? In February 2008 — back when people like Hubbard and Gramm were denying that there was any recession at all. In fact, as late as July 2008 Gramm declared that all we had was a “mental recession”, and that America had become a “nation of whiners”.

So, more than four years ago I predicted a very slow recovery. Why? Because recessions like those of 1990-91, 2001, and 2007-2009 have very different origins from recessions like 1974-75 or the double-dip recession of 1979-82. The old recessions were more or less deliberately created by the Fed via tight money to control inflation, which meant that you had a V-shaped recovery once the Fed decided that we had suffered enough and loosened the reins. The new recessions all reflected private-sector overreach, which is much harder to make up for.

Note that while I predicted a slow recovery way back when, it has been even slower than I expected. But that’s no mystery; at that point neither I nor anyone else knew just how far the private sector had overreached, plus I didn’t expect the unprecedented fiscal austerity that has been such a drag on recovery given the fact that we’re in a liquidity trap.

And yes, it is frustrating that the economic crisis is redounding to the political benefit of people who have been wrong about absolutely everything, whereas people like me may not have been right about everything, but have accumulated a pretty darn good track record over the past 5 years.