Very early on — in fact, long before the 2007 recession was either declared officially, or admitted as reality by those still touting a Bush Boom — some of us warned that recovery would be slow, and initially jobless. Why? Because this was a postmodern business cycle, brought on not by monetary tightening but by private-sector overreach, and hence harder to turn around than, say, the 1979-82 slump. Nonetheless, as Menzie Chinn notes, a constant talking point on the right has been that slow growth showed the damage done by Obama policies. And not just at Heritage or whatever; people like Ed Lazear or John Taylor demonstrated the reality of the hack gap by asserting that the private sector wasn’t creating jobs because Obama was looking at them funny; also Obamacare.

How could you test this? Well, when I began talking about postmodern recessions, I argued that the 2007 slump was the third such example — that 1990-91 and 2001 were also postmodern recessions, followed by jobless recoveries. I’ll leave 1990-91 aside for now, because I’m lazy, and just note that we now have enough information to make a clear comparison between the recovery that began in 2001 and the one that began in 2009. Since the claim has been that Obama is scaring and punishing the private sector, let’s look at private employment. It looks like this:

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Or if you look at the change in employment following the business cycle trough, it looks like this:

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By any standard I can think of, the Obama-era job recovery has been stronger than the Bush-era job recovery. Now, I don’t think that reflects excellent policies; and I would argue that in some ways the depth of the preceding slump set the stage for a faster recovery. But the point is that the usual suspects have been using the alleged uniquely poor performance under Obama to claim uniquely bad policies, or bad attitude, or something. And if that’s the game they want to play, they have just scored an impressive own goal.