Something you may not have heard, and with good reason, is that the government's budget deficit fell sharply in 2013 (from $700 billion to just below $500 billion). If the deficit continues to fall at the current rate or pace, Obama may leave his presidency with a budget surplus (something not seen since the Clinton years).Rolling Stone also posted other impressive economic achievements: the unemployment rate is down to 5.9 percent (it was 10 percent when Obama entered office), 55 consecutive months of job growth, 10 million private sector jobs created, and so on. But Obama is so unpopular at the moment that he is keeping some distance from the mid-term elections.

The big question: Why hasn't (relatively) good economic news translated into some kind of popularity for the president and his party? And why, in the light of these positive reports about falling deficits and so on, are US citizens still going to vote for the GOP? My best answer (THEORY ALERT): The Right is not about economics. Its main concern is the business of politics. The Right understands something Big Left totally misses: we live in a post-economic society. (This is something I addressed in depth in my Life Without Economics series.) The noise the Right makes about jobs and deficits is just that: noise. One only has to look at the economic performance of neoliberal policies to see that even neoliberalism is not about economics. Its policies produce poor results almost everywhere. (This point is also made by the anthropologist David Graeber in his essay "Of Flying Cars and the Declining Rate of Profit.")

Obama and his party actually believes in economics; the GOP does not. And the GOP is right: the US does not need economics. Our moment is no longer about production (economics) but distribution (politics). But we do not have a leftist politics for a post-economic society, and the Right does. For them it's all about what the economist Dean Baker calls The Conservative Nanny State. And what it comes down to is: How the Wealthy Use the Government to Stay Rich and Get Richer (distribution). In short, Obama is playing a game that the GOP does not play. What most matters in a post-economic society is the control and management of state welfare (who gets it, who doesn't).