There is the Obama administration’s description of the recovery as recovering based on Friday’s jobs report.

And then there is reality, identified by Against Crony Capitalism:

Does an official 6.3% unemployment rate mean that the economy has finally recovered?

No. Whether you call it the Great Recession or the depression it really is, the recovery that supposedly started in June 2009 has not been much of a recovery.

Here is an April 29, 2014 headline from Daily Kos, a hard left website:

Inflation-adjusted median household income down $4,309 since high point in 2008.

Left and right should at least be able to agree upon this. For the average American, there has been no recovery at all. Median household income rises in a recovery, even if there is a lag. In this case, neither President Obama’s stimulus nor the Fed’s unprecedented new money printing have pulled household income back up. Indeed, there is much evidence that they prolonged the misery.

It gets worse. Today’s median household income, adjusted for inflation, is no higher than in 1988, at the end of the Reagan presidency. The middle class has in effect stood still for more than a quarter century.

It gets worse still. The government keeps moving the goalposts on inflation. Especially under Clinton, the method of calculating it changed, and of course changed in such a way that less inflation was reported. Today the Fed complains that it wants more inflation. But if inflation were calculated the old way, it would already be running at 5% a year.

This is important. Median household income adjusted for the cost of living is not just the same as in 1988. In actuality, it is much lower. We have fallen backward for a generation.

Today’s 6.3% unemployment rate must also be taken with a grain of salt. Former Fed chair Ben Bernanke said that the Fed would start increasing interest rates when unemployment hit 6.5%. Former Fed vice chair Alan Blinder recently congratulated current Fed chair Janet Yellen for so nimbly sidestepping that pledge. As the labor force keeps contracting, the headline unemployment rate, which measures only those who say they are actively seeking work, doesn’t mean much anymore.

The government’s highest rate of unemployment, the one that includes part time workers who would rather be full time and other “discouraged” workers, now registers 12.3%. This is still an understatement. If unemployment were calculated as it was during the last great depression, it would be more like 23%. An excellent source on past versus current methods of calculating inflation and unemployment is John Williams’s shadowstats.com.

And who, by the way, has lost the most inflation-adjusted household income since the current depression began? Left and right can agree about this too: blacks, those with a high school education or less, southerners, those under 25, and those between 55 and 65. Everyone knows how hard it is in this economy for anyone, but especially anyone under 25 or over 55, to get a job. …

To see what is wrong, you need only ask: who is getting so rich in the midst of this depression? A moment’s inspection reveals that it is people with close connections to the government money fount at the Fed ( eg. Wall Street) or people with close connections to government officials ( think big companies such as Pharma and Farma, not just little green energy firms started by major Obama campaign finance donors).

This isn’t a failure of capitalism. It is instead crony capitalism run riot, and it is destroying America’s capital and economic base.

We could yet recover. To do so would require getting the government out of a leadership role in the economy. Why? Because whenever government leads, corruption follows. Money flows back and forth between Washington and all the myriad private interests.

We need a consumer led economy, one with honest prices not nudged, manipulated, or controlled by Washington. We need honest savings and thoughtful investment, the kind of investment that will create jobs for decades, not pay off cronies.

The aforementioned 12.3-percent unemployment number is the U6 rate, which is the correct measurement of unemployment.