Every so often, you run across someone who puts a new perspective on how badly the American economy is travelling. The caps to spending that came with the sequester have slowed the rot, but the anvil that has fallen on productive activity has not been lifted. The title here is Don’t Believe the Hype—We’re Not Even Close to Full Employment. Where he uses the word “hype”, I might have chosen “lies”, but at least he can explain plainly how far below potential the US economy is performing.

Before the recession, the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) projected we would have 5 million more jobs at the end of 2014 than we actually do. It also projected that the GDP would be more than 11 percent higher in 2014 than it is now. This translates into a difference in annual output of roughly $2 trillion or more than $6,000 per person. They predicted that wage and salary income would be roughly 20 percent higher than it is today. Many economists had similar projections.

Measured against where these people expected the economy to be at this point seven years ago, the economy is indeed awful. Millions of people who should have jobs don’t, and those who do have jobs are working for much lower wages than would be the case in a healthy economy.

Alas, having noted that the economy is barely alive, and that the fact of growth is hardly remarkable in a market economy, he lays the problem on the absence of anything on the demand side to drive the economy upwards. You do have to despair at someone who sees how bleak things are but attributes it to a lack of demand. Demand is subdued because value-adding supply is subdued. Value-adding supply is subdued because there is no direction in which the American economy might move that is not blocked by government regulation and waste. It is a mess all round, but as long as even those who are even willing to notice are unable to see what must be done, how does it end? As bleak as the economy is, reading this kind of thing makes me think there is a lot worse to come.