Is The Private Sector Doing Fine?

by Stuart Shapiro

Last week, President Obama took a fair amount of heat for going off script and saying that the “private sector is doing fine.”  Well the chart above is the GDP – Government Consumption Expenditures a measure of the production of the private sector.  As Matthew Yglesias explains:

To say it’s “doing fine” is overly optimistic. The private sector took a huge blow and it hasn’t recovered from that blow. But the private sector has pretty steadily grown in the Obama years, while government purchases and public investment have stagnated or fallen.

By: Stuart Shapiro

Stuart is a professor and the Director of the Public Policy
program at the Bloustein School of Planning and Public Policy at Rutgers
University. He teaches economics and cost-benefit analysis and studies
regulation in the United States at both the federal and state levels.
Prior to coming to Rutgers, Stuart worked for five years at the Office
of Management and Budget in Washington under Presidents Clinton and
George W. Bush.