It's annoying when someone makes outrageous claims about "the worst economy ever" or "slowest job recovery in a long time if not ever." Oh, really? How about the Great Depression, with a 25% unemployment rate that lasted for about a decade? How about the recession of 1981? How about the recession of 1991? Job recovery was slow after all of those. I know it's common to think that what is happening now is somehow more important than what has happened before (after all, it's happening to US!), but there's no need to exaggerate.

Sure, the job recovery has been slow after this recession, just like it has been after most recessions. Given the tech industry and stock market tanking in 2000 and 9/11, things almost certainly would've been a lot worse had those tax cuts not gone into effect. Historically, it takes a year or so for the effects of a tax cut to be felt in the economy.

Outsourcing has been going on for decades. Fortunately, so has "insourcing". According to figures I read earlier this year, over 6 million Americans work here in the US for foreign owned companies like Honda, Toyota, BMW, and Mercedes while roughly 1-2 million jobs were lost to outsourcing. Had we resorted to protectionism to try to save those million jobs, other countries quite reasonably might've done the same thing to us, resulting in a net loss of several million jobs. Protectionism is a losing proposition. After all, it was protectionist measures like the Smoot-Hawley Tariff that turned a US stock market crash into a worldwide depression.