YOU LIE ABOUT THE ECONOMY, MR. PRESIDENT

From 1820 through 2000, America’s real (inflation adjusted) gross domestic product grew at an average annual rate of 3.6 percent. Last year was the 9th consecutive year in which the economy grew less than 3 percent.

Real GDP has grown 13.6 percent since the recovery officially began in June, 2009. The average rate of growth at this point in the recoveries from the four recessions since 1975 was 21.9 percent.

If it weren’t for gains made by the well off, there wouldn’t be a "recovery." Five years after it began (by June 2014), the top 1 percent of earners (more than $366,623 a year) had garnered 81 percent of its fruits. The incomes of the top 1 tenth of 1 percent (about $8 million a year) grew 39 percent.

The incomes of the bottom 90 percent of earners declined, according to a study by University of California-Berkeley economist Emmanuel Saez. Real median household income was $54,417 in December, 5.1 percent lower than in January, 2008 ($57,317).

Most of us get nearly all our income from our jobs. Only 44 percent of adults work 30 hours or more a week, according to Gallup’s survey of the work force. Ten million fewer are working now than when Barack Obama became president.

It took until last March to create as many new jobs as were lost during the Great Recession. For every person who’s found a job, two have left the labor force.

Few new jobs are as good as those lost. In 2012, men working full time year round earned less (in inflation-adjusted dollars) than they did in 1973, Businessweek said.

About 7.3 million Americans work part time because they can’t find a full time job. Roughly 25 percent of involuntary part time workers live in poverty, according to University of New Hampshire Prof. Rebecca Glauber.

According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the unemployment rate has fallen to 5.6 percent. That’s "a big lie," says Gallup Chairman Jim Clifton. If you’ve quit looking for work after four fruitless weeks, or work as little as an hour a week, BLS doesn’t count you as unemployed, he notes.

"If you have a degree in chemistry or math and are working 10 hours part time because it is all you can find," BLS doesn’t count you either, Mr. Clifton said.

If the long term unemployed and the severely underemployed were counted, the unemployment rate in December would have been 9.1 percent, said Elise Gould, an economist for the Economic Policy Institute, a liberal think tank.

The plain fact is that it is Mr. Obama’s rules, regulations, and policies that are stifling our economy and job growth.  That’s why, of course, he’s lying about it.

About 20 percent of employers are cutting back on new hires and worker hours to avoid onerous provisions in Obamacare, surveys by Federal Reserve banks in New York and Dallas indicate.

Three major provisions in the health care law give employers incentives to cut working hours, said University of Chicago economics professor Casey Mulligan. They’ve reduced full time employment by about 4 million jobs, he estimates.

The 7,805 regulations issued by the Obama administration through December will boost to $1.88 trillion the cost of complying with federal rules, the Competitive Enterprise Institute estimates. Responding to government requests for information requires more than 9 billion hours of paperwork, said the Office of Management and Budget.

Federal regulations reduce economic growth each year by about 12 percent, estimated the National Association of Manufacturers, cost small businesses $10,000 per employee, estimated the Small Business Administration.

Many studies exaggerate the costs of regulation. But if the Phoenix Center‘s estimate that each million dollar increase in the regulatory budget reduces private sector employment by 420 jobs is just half right, the burst of regulatory activity during the Obama administration has cost at least 546,000 jobs. More than 2,000 additional rules are in the pipeline.

The national debt has risen from 48 percent of GDP in 2007 to 101.5 percent of GDP in December. Debt projected under current law could reduce average annual income by $2,000 within 25 years, CBO estimated last July.

Instead of cheerleading for a recovery which exists primarily in Obama administration rhetoric, "mainstream" journalists should be explaining why, for most of us, there hasn’t been one.

Jack Kelly is a former Marine and Green Beret and a former deputy assistant secretary of the Air Force in the Reagan administration. He is national security writer for the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.

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