Recovery held back by fiscal austerity

To hear it told this election season, North Carolina’s recovery is something to behold.  Nevermind the evidence that employment levels remain depressed and hardship high. Researchers from the Economic Policy Institute released a study this weekend that suggests that were it not for the policy choices North Carolina policymakers have made (and their Congressional counterparts), North Carolina would have experienced a far more robust a recovery.

The analysis looks at various measures of the strength of the economic recovery to demonstrate the relatively slow performance compared to prior economic expansions nationally.  Josh Bivens, author and economist with the Economic Policy Institute, then turns to an analysis of public spending, which in a downturn serves an important role in filling in the gap between where employment and output should be and where it is.

And yet, the graph below from the analysis shows that cutting spending was the actual response post-2010, slowing the pace of recovery.  From Bivens:

[The graph] shows the growth in per capita spending by federal, state, and local governments following the troughs of the four recessions. Astoundingly, per capita government spending in the first quarter of 2016—27 quarters into the recovery—was nearly 3.5 percent lower than it was at the trough of the Great Recession. By contrast, 27 quarters into the early 1990s recovery, per capita government spending was 3 percent higher than at the trough, 23 quarters following the early 2000s recession (a shorter recovery) it was 10 percent higher, and 27 quarters into the early 1980s recovery it was 17 percent higher.

Bivens concludes that: “If government spending following the Great Recession’s end tracked spending that followed the recession of the early 1980s for the first 27 quarters, governments in 2015 would have been spending an additional trillion dollars in that year alone, translating into several years of full employment.”

The full piece is worth a read here.