It's the Houses, Stupid
The big-government/anti-business recovery has been neither big-government nor anti-business. It's just been a total disaster for everything that has to do with housing.

Reuters
Mitt Romney and Newt Gingrich like to call the White HouseĀ "the most anti-business, anti-investment, anti-job creator administration" in modern history, because they can. The economy is weak, and their audiences are likely to agree with the vague sentiment of these ominous accusations. But these statements aren't merely untestable declarations. They are falsifiable claims. And they're probably false.
When you compare Obama's term to our last eight recoveries, the record looks almost normal. Almost. Even with the awful summer of 2011, the economy added nearly 2 million jobs in the last 12 months, the best in five years. The recovery in business investment tracks very closely to the average of the last eight recoveries. Our recovery in exports has been an expected highlight. And it hasn't been dependent on sustained growth in government. The stimulus kicked in before the end of the recession, but since that time, it's tapered off so that today, the increase in real federal government spending is also totally average (see below -- graphs from the economic memo Bouncing Like a Slinky by Michael E. Feroli, of JP Morgan, and Ethan S. Harris, of Bank of America).

What's different? Housing is different. And it's been a nightmare. Single-home construction took a nosedive after ascending through the previous decade. Home equity, which makes up 80% of household wealth for the bottom fifth, has collapsed. Service jobs around the real estate industry have been decimated, especially in the Michican/California/Arizona/Nevada/Florida nexus of doom. Residential investment is the key variable here, and it's been flat out decimated. Related is the misery of state and local government financing. Local governments get up to 80% of their revenue from property taxes, so you can imagine why they've been killed. State government have suffered similar financing droughts since the end of the stimulus.
But the illusion of a big-government, anti-business administration holding back the recovery doesn't seem to hold up. The evidence suggests the recovery has been neither big-government nor anti-business. Total government has declined, the federal government has grown at a slightly-above-normal pace since 2009, and business investment has been normal for a recovery. The claim that regulatory uncertainty is a burden for small companies might be true on a small scale, but it is not as powerful as the clear-cut demand-side arguments. The recovery has been a drag because housing has provided a monstrous anchor, dragging down construction, local tax revenues, service jobs, entrepreneurship, credit availability and overall spending.
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