here now is distinguished stanford economics university ed lazear. he is former president council. the worst economic recovery in history. is it because of the tax and revenue issues, or is there other stuff at work? >> well, that's a tough question. i think there are people who think this was obviously a very

here now is distinguished stanford economics university ed lazear. he is former president council.orst economic recovery in history. is it because of the tax and revenue issues, or is there other stuff at work? >> well, that's a tough question. i think there are people who think this was obviously a very bad recession. when you have a very bad recession, the question is do you come out of it more quickly or less quickly. you remember the reagan recession in the early '80s. we rocketed out of that one. and the evidence that we have in economics suggests that the deeper the recession, the quicker the recovery. so in some sense, this should have been a strong recovery. the problem is it's not a recovery at all. so if you look at where we are right now, what we've done is we've reverted at best to long-term growth. but we haven't made up for the lost ground. and that's a big problem. and it's really unprecedented. >> let me ask you this. okay. you have this big downturn and you're supposed to have this big recovery. >> right. >> i totally get that. now, i did see it in the stock market

ed lazear was the council on the economic advisers. he now teaches at stanford university. he was a guy who had to sell things, sell a lot of the administration -- and it's a different skill. pr skills and hopefully you know your stuff, right? >> al did some things, too. >> al is great. like a frontman almost. he knows his stuff, too. i've been dying to ask you this for a while but then it was rekindled by your piece and i took a shot of your piece on april 2nd in "the wall street journal." here's why it's important. we're going to here the narrative in this election, one is going to come from the obama administration. this was the worst downturn since the great depression. our policies are working. we are going in the right direction and it's better than when we came in. the narrative from the republicans are going to be, your policies made this worse and the u.s. economy is resilient and would have come back any way and 800 billion to try to keep the unemployment from going above 8%, it's been above 8% for your entire presidency. that's the issue. i bought into that this