Krugman: repubicans are "desperately trying to claim that the economic recovery now underway is an

[progree]

23. Before the crash we had an unsustainable wild bubble economy

It's true we're not recovered to the level of the housing bubble years or even the tech bubble years in most statistics. But pre-crash was the height of the sick feverish unsustainable housing bubble economy when people were using their homes as ATMs to the tune of hundreds of billions of dollars a year. And the financial sector was booming like crazy on derivatives. I don't think that's the economy we should want or compare to or pine and sigh for.

The past year has been particularly heartening (for the most part):

Over the last year (last 12 months):
+3,296,000 Payroll Jobs (Establishment Survey, CES0000000001)
+1,314,000 Labor Force
+2,996,000 Employed
-1,682,000 Unemployed
+0.5% Employment-To-Population Ratio aka Employment Rate
-0.2% LFPR (Labor Force Participation rate)
-1.2% Unemployment rate
-1.6% U-6 unemployment rate (It includes anyone that looked for work even once in the past year)
-569,000 Part-Time Workers who want Full-Time Jobs (Table A-8's Part-Time For Economic Reasons)
+ 89,000 Part-Time Workers (Table A-9)
+2,975,000 Full-Time Workers (Table A-9)
+3.19% INFLATION ADJUSTED Weekly Earnings of Production and Non-Supervisory Workers

I also note that the U.S. is about the only developed economy that is showing decent growth. Japan wavers between recession and being barely out of recession. Europe is just barely above water growth-wise.

As for how bad wages are -- here is the average hourly wage of production and non-supervisory employees, adjusted for inflation (and expressed in chained 1982-1984 dollars)

http://data.bls.gov/timeseries/CES0500000032



Note this statistic does not include CEOs or any other kind of executive. This doesn't include business owners. This doesn't include managers or supervisors. These are all people working for someone else for a paycheck who have noone reporting to them. These are not the financial and economic glitteratti. And yet they are doing better than under Bush, even better than under Clinton.

Here's the series without inflation-adjustment: http://data.bls.gov/timeseries/CES0500000008