Wow, it only took how many years now? If I remember correctly (and I do), we were told 2010 was the summer of recovery. Hey, we're only 6 years late.
This isn't a recovery.
1943-73 USA is manufacturer to the world. Trade and labor policies kept wages/benefits high - workers participated fully in the prosperity made off their backs. The father could support his entire family, allowing the mother to stay home and raise the kids.
1974 - 80: Oil shock > stagflation = high unemployment and high inflation.
1980-2016: Big business captures the Republican Party. They want a lower cost of production (higher profits). Ronald Reagan convinced us that we can no longer afford the tax, regulatory and labor policies that created the postwar middle class.
Reaganomics imposes neoliberal reforms on the economy based around lowering the labor/tax/regulatory costs imposed on capital. New Trade Laws enable outsourcing, enabling American capitalists to scour the globe for the cheapest labor costs. This put downward pressure on wages as American workers were forced to compete with Taiwanese sweatshops.
American deindustrialization. Factories close as manufacturing is sent to Asia. Inner cities have large superfluous populations without jobs. Crime explodes.
America shifts from an empire of production to empire of consumption. Shopping malls sprout up everywhere, offering low wage retail job that don't pay enough to survive. Shopping malls become cathedrals of false needs and shallow consumption, catering to struggling Americans waiving credit cards. After shipping the jobs to more profitable labor markets, Reagan leads the transition from wage-based consumption to debt-based consumption.
American families borrow like never before to make up for lost jobs and stagnant wages. Clinton strengthens the forces of low-wage globalization with NAFTA (which was the completion of Reagan/Bush's Superhighway, which envisioned North America as a borderless web of free trade, allowing wealthy capitalists to send production to whichever regional workforce would work for less. This policy successfully drives wages to the bottom, making it more imperative that hard working families embrace massive debt to stay afloat).
2000-2008: After 30 years of debt-based consumption, we had to hawk the last thing left with any value our homes. New tools of financialization enable Americans to turn their homes into ATMs. Bush declares Wild West mortgage lending, which further stimulates a dead economy with fake bubblized money.
2008: The economy finally explodes. Credit markets freeze. Americans have borrowed themselves into a nightmare.
2016: Obama has the longest stretch of job creation in 50 years - but the jobs suck because the forces unleashed by globalization have ended the high wage structure of the postwar years. The game is over. There is no good news. The only jobs to come back are ones where our workers have underbid Mexican or Taiwanese slaves. Capital has won.