How bad is it?

Here's a chart from "Calculated Risk" that puts the current Great Recession in context of all of the post-WWII recessions the US has faced:

As you can see...it's pretty bad.  Far worse than anything since the Great Depression, as we now well know.  Small comfort, but via Ezra Klein there is this:  Even given the slow, staggering recovery and the prolonged unemployment, compared to big economic meltdowns that have hit comparable industrialized countries in recent decades, "the U.S. labor market has performed better than 4 of the previous Big 5 crises.”

Former President Bill Clinton put the Obama administration's performance managing the crisis in perspective last week:

“First of all, he became president just a few months after the financial crash. Now, keep in mind, even before the financial crash, in the eight years before the financial crash, we had almost no new jobs. Only 10% as many as we had when I was president. Real family income was lower than it was the day I left office. The economy was weak as could be. Then you had this financial crash. Historically these things take five years to get over…. The American people are not used to waiting five years for anything good to happen, but that’s what we’re facing. And if you want to speed it up, we've got to do things in the government.”

And that's the crux.  For whatever one might fault President Obama and his advisors as regards "best policy" that a Paul Krugman might conjure, we have legislative roadblocks that preclude further significant government action due to Republican ideological and political recalcitrance. That's become our biggest problem as an economy and as a country.

Via Washington Monthly