A Tale of Two Recoveries

Near unanimity reigns on Wall Street that the economy will keep expanding and the stock market will rise further this year. Corporate profits are growing as worker productivity improves. Commodities prices are levitating. Retail sales have moderately increased. Even junk bond yields are relatively benign. Stock market investors, even if still shell shocked from two years ago, are doing better. In the tonier parts of Standard Metropolitan Statistical Areas, things are looking up.

Evidence of recovery is harder to find elsewhere. Food banks remain heavily patronized. Unemployment levels cling tenaciously near the 10% level. The long term unemployed are becoming entrenched in joblessness. Wages are stagnant. Many unemployed who find jobs have to accept lower incomes. Real estate prices are dropping again, after a brief and shallow upswing. Mortgage rates have risen off record lows, dampening refinancings and home purchases.

There has never been a lasting economic recovery without a restoration of full employment and a strong housing market. Neither seems to be in the offing, not for years. America is dividing into two camps. There are the relatively few well-off, who own most of the assets and are the least likely to be laid off. They have more resources to ride out the bad times and greater opportunities to profit from a rebound. Then, there is everyone else, for whom the Great Recession continues.

Today's politics only exacerbate the divide. Many moderate and middle income taxpayers, frustrated by the disparate impact of the recovery, became Tea Partiers and voted Republican. But the resurgent Republicans made sure that the wealthy were protected in the tax deal they cut with President Obama this past fall. The same tax deal also gave everyone a 2% cut in Social Security taxes, while the more progressive $400 Making Work Pay tax credit wasn't renewed. The first legislative maneuver by the new Republican majority in the House is to schedule a vote to repeal last year's health insurance reform law. This symbolic digital salute will do nothing to improve the economy or help the unemployed.

Deficit reduction is on every politician's list of resolutions for this year. But you know how it goes with New Year's resolutions. There's more water to be found in the Sahara than spending cuts in Washington. Last fall's tax deal, the first major product of the new bipartisanship, widened the deficit. The only way to truly reduce the deficit is to cut Social Security and Medicare spending, and/or raise taxes. Recent polls show that a large majority of Americans, from Millenials to the World War II generation, oppose cuts in either program. Yet there is no way today's Republican-controlled House would sign off on tax increases (even though a recent poll shows most Americans favor increasing taxes on the well-to-do in order to balance the budget). So the new bipartisanship will produce, at best, nominal deficit reductions in highly visible ways (a la the two-year pay freeze for federal employees, which hardly affects the deficit but sounds good in press releases). Given that today's recovery is largely due to deficit spending and the slackest monetary policy ever adopted by the Fed, there is little incentive in Washington to control deficits. No politician wants to be the grinch that stole the recovery.

But for most Americans (i.e., the majority trapped in stagnation), there hasn't been much of a recovery to steal. Current projections are for high unemployment and depressed real estate prices to linger for years after 2012. America may be morphing into a society where a small group of elites enjoy prosperity while everyone else just gets by (or not). That's not a good development for a nation dedicated to the pursuit of happiness. America was founded by immigrants aspiring for better lives. If hope dies, the essence of the nation is lost. The damage from the Great Recession will be great, indeed, if the nation loses its heart.