Are we better off than 4 years ago? Mostly so

Greg Sargent at the Washington Post says that the Romney campaign is hoping for a mediocre jobs report this Friday to step on any momentum the Obama folks may get from the Democratic convention this week. The Romney/ GOP folks also want a bad report so they can continue to say the country has fewer jobs under Obama than before he took over, which as Sargent mentions, is a dishonest statement because it includes the 3 pre-stimulus months in 2009 where the U.S. lost 2.34 million jobs. If you start from April 2009 instead, Obama is UP 1.2 million.

But regardless, it does beg the question- are we better off than we were 4 years ago? One area where we indistupably is not is under incomes, as median household income went down nearly 3% from 2008-2010, and does not seem to have recovered much in the last 2 years either. However, this has been largely done under GOP policies, as the tax rates for the rich have stayed the same under Obama, and pro-worker policies like cap-and-trade and card check were shot down in Congress. So all the GOP can offer is the same polciies that are currently in place, and in many cases, they plan to put the present day on steroids, such as when they decided to follow Scott Walker's lead and endorsed a nationwide "right-to-work (for less)" policy in their recently-approved platform.

That being said, there are signs of hope that perhaps stagnant incomes are going to start going back up. One of those signs was released last week when the Bureau of Economic Analysis said real Disposable Personal Income was up a strong 0.3% for July, and had gone up 2.3% since the start of the year. The report also shows that real disposable income has now finally gotten back to the level it was in Q2 2008, before the Bush Recession hit full force and took nearly $600 billion of disposable income away from Americans between then and the end of 2009 (or nearly $2,000 for every woman, man and child in the country. Yeah, ouch).

And unlike previous months, the increased take-home pay translated into more consumer spending, as real Personal Consumption Expenditures went up 0.4% in July, as opposed to an increase of 0.2% for the previous 3 months combined. This indicates that the 3rd Quarter was off to a good start economically. Obviously, there's still 2 months of data to deal with and the gsasoline price increases may tamper things down a bit, but there is little indication that the economy is doing anything other than growing right now.

As I've also mentioned, the lack of wages trickling down to workers has been one of the few pieces missing in the slow-but-steady recovery that the nation has been under since the middle of 2009. And the upward revision of 2012's 2nd Quarter GDP figures confirmed that we are still expanding, with growth going to 1.7% vs. the previously reported 1.5%, and year-over-year growth went up to 2.3%. This also means GDP has grown 1.9% since the 2nd quarter of 2008, and the private sector is up 2.4% the last 4 years.

And the jobs numbers that the Romney folks are hoping will look bad on Friday show that we've gotten much of the jobs back that were lost during the Great Recession. This chart will remind you of the crater that was left due to several months of massive job losses in 2008 and 2009, and show how we've slowly climbed our way back in the last 3 years under Obama.

Looks like we're going the right way if you ask me, and by a lot of measures, we're clearly on our way out of the hole dug for us by the Bush years. So if the GOP wants to use the Reagan question of "Are you better off than you were 4 years ago?", I'd look at where we were heading in 2008, look where we are now in 2012, and say in the big picture, the answer is YES.