President Barack Obama thinks Americans don’t properly appreciate the benefits of his economic policies — a view he most recently expressed in an interview with The New York Times, according to an opinion yesterday by Bloomberg View Columnist Prof. Narayan Kocherlakota, who is the Lionel W. McKenzie Professor of Economics at the University of Rochester. Isolating the effects of any president’s policies is close to impossible. That said, it’s not hard to see why many people are disappointed with the performance of the economy during Obama’s time in office. In January 2009, at the beginning of Obama’s first term, the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office issued a 10-year forecast for the U.S. economy, including such indicators as unemployment, gross domestic product, the budget deficit, government debt and interest rates. The unemployment rate has come closest to expectations. Although it remained very high through much of the Obama presidency, it had fallen to near historical averages by 2015. Elsewhere, the story is less positive. Total income growth in the U.S. has fallen well short of expectations, in both nominal and inflation-adjusted terms. And although Obama expressed pride in the recent decline in the federal budget deficit, it’s still much larger than the CBO forecast in 2009 — as is the ratio of government debt to GDP. Should policymakers be satisfied, as though this were the best that America can do? At times in his <em>Times</em> interview, Obama seemed to suggest that he thought so, but in his commentary, Kocherlakota strongly disagrees.
