What U.S. Economic Recovery?

While the Administration is taking a sort of "move along, nothing to see here" approach, Republicans are trying to pin every economic problem on Obama in the run-up to the 2012 election. Let's be clear: the slow growth the U.S. is experiencing is not an Obama-specific problem. Many of the ingredients in it were already baked into the economy and were simply laid bare by the financial crisis. According to research by Rogoff and economist Carmen Reinhart, it takes four years after a financial crisis just to get back to the same per capita GDP level you started with, and there's no doubt things would have been dramatically worse had the Administration not taken all the action it did in the wake of the crisis.

There may be $2 trillion sitting on the balance sheets of American corporations globally, but firms show no signs of wanting to spend it in order to hire workers at home, however much Washington might hope they will. Meanwhile, the average American is feeling poorer by the week. "If one looks at unemployment and housing, it's clear that for all practical purposes, we have yet to fully get out of recession," says Harvard economist Ken Rogoff, summing up what everyone who doesn't live inside the Beltway Bubble is thinking.

The Republicans have pulled off a major (some would say cynical) miracle by convincing the majority of Americans that the way to jump-start the economy is to slash taxes on the wealthy and on cash-hoarding corporations while cutting benefits for millions of Americans. It's fun-house math that can't work; we'll need both tax increases and sensible entitlement cuts to get back on track. Yet surveys show 50% of Americans think that not raising the debt ceiling is a good idea — that you can somehow starve your way to economic growth.

For more: What U.S. Economic Recovery? Five Destructive Myths - TIME