On top of the heap: compared to the eurozone, Britain, and Japan, the United States shines.

• Author: Berry, John M.

More than half a decade since the financial crisis struck, the United States, Japan, most of Europe, and many other countries are still struggling with some combination of slow or negligible growth, high unemployment, large budget deficits, and rising debt burdens. Most face only unpalatable policy choices to make things better.

Austerity--excessive austerity--has been the watchword everywhere except Japan, where government debt levels are nevertheless the highest in the world and the economy effectively stagnant. In the eurozone, austerity demanded by Germany as a condition of helping highly indebted countries such as Greece, Spain, Portugal, and Italy has helped push unemployment to a record high average of nearly 12 percent. More than one-fourth of workers in Greece and Spain are without jobs.

Against that background, it was hardly a surprise when Olivier Blanchard, the International Monetary Fund's research director, remarked in January while explaining the IMF's latest world economic forecast, "The United States is in better shape than Europe or Japan."

That view was reinforced a short time later by the Congressional Budget Office's own update of the U.S. economic and budget outlook: After four years of federal deficits of more than $1 trillion and a peak deficit of 10 percent of GDP in 2009, this year the deficit is forecast to be down to $845 billion and 5.3 percent of GDR Moreover, with no further changes in policy, both measures are expected to be only half this year's level in 2015.

In addition, the Congressional Budget Office projected that the ratio of publicly held debt to GDP, which is expected to reach 76.3 percent this year, will remain close to that level for the next ten years.

All that has come at a price in terms of growth and jobs, as it has in the euro countries and Britain. The hotly contested decisions to raise taxes and cut spending in order to bring deficits under better control have meant that almost no progress has been made on closing the yawning gaps between actual and potential output created by the recession that followed the crisis.

According to the Congressional Budget Office, the latest rounds of fiscal tightening in the United States will hold economic growth to only 1.4 percent this year, roughly half what it otherwise would have been. As a consequence, there will be little if any decline this year in the near-8 percent U.S. unemployment rate. Even with a sharp pickup in growth in 2014, joblessness is expected to stay above 7.5 percent through next year. If so, that would be the sixth year in a row with unemployment that high or higher--"the longest such period in the past seventy years," the Congressional Budget Office said.

In the eurozone, where there has been a far greater emphasis on austerity as a cure for the strains created by having a single currency and the huge disparities in economic conditions in...