The Economic Report of the President is an annual report written by the Chair of the Council of Economic Advisers. An important vehicle for presenting the Administration’s domestic and international economic policies, it provides an overview of the nation's economic progress with text and extensive data appendices.

CHAPTER 1
FROM CRISIS TO RECOVERY AND GROWTH
the recession that began at the end of 2007 was both the longest and the worst since the Great Depression more than 75 years ago. By some measures, such as the total jobs lost, it was as deep as the past three recessions combined.

It was a breathtaking moment of free fall in the private sector. Capital markets collapsed. Credit to businesses froze. Banks failed. Foreclosures soared. National output fell at rates not seen in decades. And millions of people lost their jobs.

Policymakers in the Administration, Congress, and the Federal Reserve responded with aggressive, concerted actions to stop the crisis. Although there will likely be debates over the impact of each of those responses for decades to come, few  can dispute that the economic climatehas improved substantially from the darkest days at the end of 2008 and the beginning of 2009 in large part because of these actions. And the Nation’s economy did not fall into depression.

As gross domestic product (GDP) has been recovering, and as the private sector has added more than 1.1 million jobs since the beginning of 2010, economic policy has shifted from crisis to recovery and fostering growth.

this year, the Economic Report of the President puts its primary focus on the particular moment in which the Nation now finds itself—a moment when the most important priority is reestablishing the primacy of broadbased growth to ensure the well-being of the American people and to keep America the premier economy on earth. ...

Read Full: Economic Report of the President 2011

PDF format, 10MB, 316Pages.

Economic Report of The President
To the Congress of the United States:

As we begin a new year, the country is still emerging from the worst recession in generations. Across the nation, millions lost their jobs, their businesses, and their sense of security about the future. Many have had to put off their plans for a better life: going to college, buying a new home, or retiring after a long career.

At the same time, we’ve seen encouraging signs that the recovery is beginning to take hold. An economy that had been shrinking for a year is now growing again. After two years of job losses, our economy added more than one million private sector jobs in 2010. Yet, as we all are too well aware, the recovery is not happening fast enough. Millions of Americans—our neighbors, friends, family members—are still looking for jobs. this means that the most immediate task must be to get our fellow Americans back to work by accelerating economic growth and job creation by the private sector.

That’s why, at the end of last year, I signed into law a measure to prevent taxes from rising on middle-class families and to create new incentives for businesses to create jobs. this bipartisan compromise cut payroll taxes for 155 million workers, prevented a $3,000 tax increase from going into effect on the typical working family, and extended important tax credits to help families make ends meet and send their kids to college.

The law also extended unemployment insurance, preventing 7 million Americans from losing their benefits as they look for new work, and gave businesses two powerful incentives to invest and create jobs. these were 100 percent expensing of investment expenditures and an extension of the research and experimentation tax credit. ...

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