See? What’d Obama tell you?  It’s working!

The Obama administration says one reason the U.S. economic recovery has been so slow is that it is still suffering from the aftermath of the financial crisis. But the U.S. is not the first country to suffer a recession and a financial crisis. And the U.S. recovery is doing worse than all of them.

In a new research note, JPMorgan points out that since 1970, Japan, Finland and Sweden have all gone through what the U.S. is currently going through. And all three of them had recoveries stronger than America’s.

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You should particularly note how the U.S. is doing versus Japan, another large, advanced economy. As JPMorgan economist Michael Feroli notes:

The poster child for slow growth coming out of a debt-fuelled financial crisis has to be Japan, which ever since the early 1990s has had trouble getting a head of steam. The recession which kicked off Japan’s “lost decade” lasted from 1991 to 1993. Including the recovery experience from that recession is sobering: we are currently faring worse than Japan at the same point in their lost decade.

So is the U.S. headed for a Lost Decade (or more) of weak growth, too?

Well, that depends.  Are we going to wise up and ditch the Marxists, socialists, collectivists, crony capitalists, ersatz “pragmatists,” and liberal fascists — not just in the elected branches but those burrowed like tics in the bureaucracies, as well?  Along with most of the federal departments themselves?

Are we going to return to a constitutional form of government, one that provides the working framework for a free-market capitalist republic built around the idea of a free people pursuing their self interests?  Are we ready to resist the leftist deconstruction of our founding principles — and to beat back the “progressive” assumptions that have become so institutionalized that they oftentimes direct the trajectory of our very thinking?

Because all of those things need doing.

Without which, we’re heading for more than just a Lost Decade. We’re heading for the end of the greatest experiment in self-governance and individual liberty ever designed to protect the natural rights of man.

Followed, naturally, by misery.