'Rebound? What Rebound?' Update; Not a Full Recovery By ANY Definition

As Investors Business Daily noted Friday evening, the economy has not yet recovered from what I have been calling the POR (Pelosi-Obama-Reid) Economy for over three years, and the Fear-Based Economy for just over a month.

This is true whether you peg the recession's beginning as the third quarter of 2008, based on the normal definition of recession (“a decline in GDP for two or more consecutive quarters”) or from the fourth quarter of 2007, if you use the flawed definition (with the accompany flawed application) of the National Bureau of Economic Research.

Here are the specifics, from the government's Bureau of Economic Analysis (in 2005 chained, i.e., inlation-adjusted, dollars):

It's even worse if you look at private-sector GDP:

You don't even want to know how far away we are compared to Warren Buffett's recovery benchmark, which would be, in his words, when “real per capita GDP gets back up to where it was before” …

… oh sure you do:

No matter how you slice it, it's miserable — and unprecedented since World War II.

As IBD stated yesterday in its editorial's conclusion:

If a patient were taking an unusually long time to recover from an illness, a responsible doctor would try a new treatment regimen, rather than simply administer larger doses of the same drugs. He might even consult other doctors to see if they've had better luck with different prescriptions.

But Dr. Obama gives no sign of doing anything other than pump more Keynesian medicine into the IV. It's possible he'll try a different approach in September, when he gives his much-anticipated jobs speech. If he doesn't, it will be nothing short of malpractice.

A pretty safe prediction is that it WILL be nothing short of malpractice.