...By virtually any measure, the economy is far better than when Obama took office. (How much credit Obama and his policies deserve for that improvement is a separate debate.)
But Obama has made less progress on a set of deeper, structural problems that began years or even decades before the recession. Among them: slow growth in wages and productivity; rising inequality; falling labor force participation, especially among men; and the decline of manufacturing and the failure to find a new source of middle-class jobs to replace it. The bubble-driven boom of the mid-2000s papered over some of those problems — laid-off manufacturing workers got jobs in construction, families offset reduced incomes by borrowing against their homes — until the housing bust revealed them. The recovery has done little to address these issues; many of them have gotten worse.
