John Taylor, the George P. Shultz Senior Fellow in Economics at the Hoover Institution and the Mary and Robert Raymond Professor of Economics at Stanford University, spoke at the congressional hearing on “Regulation Nation: The Obama Administration’s Regulatory Expansion vs. Jobs and Economic Recovery,” on September 20, 2012. Taylor testified that the current recovery began in the third quarter of 2009 and that it was weak from the start. By its second anniversary, the recovery was still so weak that he called it “a recovery in name only, so weak as to be nonexistent. The normal rebound in job creation and economic growth was delayed. Now the recovery has been delayed yet another year. It’s the worst recovery from a deep recession since the recovery from the Great Depression and perhaps in American history—a tragedy that should not be minimized.”

Said Taylor, “I have come to the conclusion that the delayed recovery is due to poor government policies, of which regulatory expansion and policy uncertainty are a substantial part. Indeed, this is the general conclusion of a number of researchers whose findings we have collected in the just released book Government Policies and the Delayed Economic Recovery (see Ohanian, Taylor, and Wright [2012]). As explained in the book’s introduction, “the delayed recovery has been due to the enactment of poor economic policies and the failure to implement good economic policies. . . .  The clear implication is that a change in the direction of economic policy is sorely needed.”

Read the transcript of Taylor's testimony: testimony-committee-judiciary-9-20-12.pdf