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Notebook

What Obama Really Thinks About His Economic Legacy

President Barack ObamaCredit...Katy Grannan for The New York Times

For the cover story in the magazine’s Money Issue, President Obama sat down with Andrew Ross Sorkin to speak candidly about his administration’s efforts to rebuild the U.S. economy after the 2008 financial crisis. Here’s what we learned:

1. He believes the U.S. economy is in better shape than the public appreciates.

“I actually compare our economic performance to how, historically, countries that have wrenching financial crises perform. By that measure, we probably managed this better than any large economy on Earth in modern history.”

2. But he also believes his administration could have done more if he had sold his policies more effectively.

“The fact of the matter is that our failure in 2012, 2013, 2014, to initiate a massive infrastructure project — it was the perfect time to do it; low interest rates, construction industry is still on its heels, massive need — the fact that we failed to do that, for example, cost us time,” Obama said. “It meant that there were folks who we could have helped and put back to work and entire communities that could have prospered that ended up taking a lot longer to recovery.”

3. These shortcomings continue to haunt him.

“I can probably tick off three or four common-sense things we could have done where we’d be growing a percentage or two faster each year. We could have brought down the unemployment rate lower, faster. We could have been lifting wages even faster than we did. And those things keep me up at night sometimes.”

4. He disagrees with criticism he got from the left about his stimulus plan.

“Progressives don’t fully appreciate the degree to which the 2011 budget deal not only averted a potential default but actually limited the potential damage of a newly emboldened Congress in imposing austerity on a still-fragile recovery,” Obama said. “And by me winning in 2012 and getting the Bush tax cuts for the upper 2 percent repealed, we ended up getting a grand bargain. It’s just we got it sequentially instead of all at once.”

5. He’s irritated by the hatred he gets from Wall Street.

“One of the constants that I’ve had to deal with over the last few years is folks on Wall Street complaining even as the stock market went from in the 6,000s to 16,000 or 17,000,” he said. “They’d be constantly complaining about our economic policies. That’s not rooted in anything they’re experiencing; it has to do with ideology and their aggravations about higher taxes.”

6. He believes there is no basis for the Republican presidential candidates’ economic platforms.

“If you look at the platforms, the economic platforms of the current Republican candidates for president, they don’t simply defy logic and any known economic theories, they are fantasy,” Obama said. “Slashing taxes particularly for those at the very top, dismantling regulatory regimes that protect our air and our environment and then projecting that this is going to lead to 5 percent or 7 percent growth, and claiming that they’ll do all this while balancing the budget. Nobody would even, with the most rudimentary knowledge of economics, think that any of those things are plausible.”

7. He thinks that our economic future depends on dispelling several widely held beliefs from the past.

“If we can’t puncture some of the mythology around austerity, politics or tax cuts or the mythology that’s been built up around the Reagan revolution, where somehow people genuinely think that he slashed government and slashed the deficit and that the recovery was because of all these massive tax cuts, as opposed to a shift in interest-rate policy — if we can’t describe that effectively, then we’re doomed to keep on making more and more mistakes.”

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