Please don’t tell me that the U.S. economy is moving in the right direction, however slowly. I hear this from politicians and commentators all the time. It isn’t. Not even close. Key economic metrics offer no encouragement at all.

The two big ones, gross domestic product (GDP) and unemployment, are both woefully inadequate, regardless of what people say. Sure, unemployment as measured by the Department of Labor has gone down, but this is only because the denominator of how many are in the workforce has decreased and is really low as a percent of the population. Meanwhile, GDP will have grown only 1.9 percent in 2012, which is pathetic. After a serious recession, the economy historically gets one big bounce. That hasn’t happened yet.

The reason the U.S. economy is stalled like this, in my view, is that our elected officials, from the president, to Congress, to governors and mayors, are focused on the wrong things. They’re concerned about government spending on infrastructure, schools, police, firemen, and the military—on government jobs and projects of all types. They’re fixated on pensions and benefits—on how to spend money, not how to create wealth.

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