Then, in 2010, Republicans took control of the House and were in a position to force Obama into years of spending cuts that exerted a significant drag on economic growth. This drag wasn’t enough to prevent a sustained economic recovery, but the recovery could and should have been much faster. There was no economic reason we shouldn’t have returned to full employment by, say, 2013; instead, largely thanks to fiscal austerity, the average unemployment rate that year was still above 7%.