The economist Alan Reynolds supplies some numbers to buttress our complaints about the President’s overheated rhetoric:

It’s a recession, not a ‘catastrophe’…A wise adviser to President John Kennedy, Arthur Okun of Yale, devised the “misery index” to gauge the pain of economic crisis – a measure that simply adds together the unemployment rate and the inflation rate. It hit 22 percent in June 1980, during an inflationary recession that preceded the Fed’s disinflationary squeeze of 1981-82. The misery index was nearly as bad in January 1975, at 19.9 percent.

Assuming inflation was close to zero this January, the misery index would have been roughly the same as the unemployment rate, or 7.6 percent. By this standard, we have a very long way to go before the economy feels nearly as miserable as it did in 1975 or 1980…

In a 1999 Business Week column, Harvard economist Robert Barro suggested we should also improve the misery index by adding a long-term interest rate (and GDP). The table shows 30-year mortgage rates. By that measure, there’s no way we’ll come close to matching the sort of misery of past recessions — notably, the 18.45 percent mortgage rate of October 1981.

With one exception — the steep 45 percent drop in the S&P 500 stock index since October 2007 — few other indicators of economic distress could support this being the worst postwar recession. Thanks to low inflation, for example, real disposable income rose every month during the fourth quarter — at an annual rate above 6 percent.

About Obama, Reynolds says: “It’s not helpful for him to be warning of a ‘catastrophe’ and making vague, untenable allusions to the Great Depression…curative processes do not take years, as the president suggests — unless the government does too much foolish tinkering. But recovery will require more perspective and patience than we’ve been seeing from the White House lately.”

Perspective might be the key; every first experience of a child or teen seems terribly important and earth-shattering. It’s certainly possible that we’re witnessing the underdeveloped reactions of a tyro on the national stage, not some sophisticated political instincts.

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