Obama: Republican candidates' economic policies are pure 'fantasy'

President in interview admits several of his own missteps but says a mixture of tax and regulation cuts, a balanced budget and economic growth defies logic

Barack Obama has accused the Republican presidential candidates of defying logic and peddling "fantasy" in telling voters they can cut taxes and government regulations, balance the budget and produce economic growth.

"If you look at the platforms, the economic platforms of the current Republican candidates for president, they don't simply defy logic and any known economic theories, they are fantasy," Obama said, in an extensive and at times surprisingly frank reflection on his economic legacy in an interview with the New York Times's Andrew Ross Sorkin.

I can probably tick off three or four common-sense things we could have done where we'd be growing a percentage or two faster each year ... We could have brought down the unemployment rate lower, faster. We could have been lifting wages even faster than we did. And those things keep me up at night sometimes.

If we can't puncture some of the mythology around austerity, politics or tax cuts or the mythology that's been built up around the Reagan revolution, where somehow people genuinely think that he slashed government and slashed the deficit and that the recovery was because of all these massive tax cuts, as opposed to a shift in interest-rate policy - if we can't describe that effectively, then we're doomed to keep on making more and more mistakes.

The fact of the matter is, is that our failure in 2012, 2013, 2014, to initiate a massive infrastructure project - it was the perfect time to do it; low interest rates, construction industry is still on its heels, massive need - the fact that we failed to do that, for example, cost us time ... It meant that there were folks who we could have helped and put back to work and entire communities that could have prospered that ended up taking a lot longer to recovery.