On February 23, the day before Fed Chair Janet Yellen is slated to present her semi-annual report to Congress, Mark M. Zandi, Co-Founder and Chief Economist of Moody’s Analytics, who has been a senior adviser to Republican presidential candidates but has also been consulted frequently by both parties in Congress, appeared on C-SPAN’s Washington Journal to discuss the outlook for the economy.

In presentations this writer has seen, Zandi is careful to explain that while Economy.com is part of Moody’s, it is separate from the Moody’s rating service.

Zandi was interviewed by host Paul Orgel, who explained that this interview is part of C-SPAN’s “Your Money” series, which looks each Monday at the cost of various federal programs, who began by asking how the US economy is doing heading into the spring of 2015.

Zandi responded that the economy is doing “much better” and has created three million jobs over the past year, the best since the height of the tech boom in the late 1990s, and the improvement is across the board and not concentrated in low-paying service jobs, as it was in the beginning of the recovery, so he find that as to employment, the economy is “still not there but moving in the right direction.”

The number of job openings stands at five million, the highest since this relatively new statistical series of the Bureau of Labor Statistics began in the early 2000s. Zandi extended his positive outlook to 2016 as well as 2015.

Orgel asked about the geographic distribution of the job growth, and Zandi said it is taking place across the country, although there are still pockets of weakness in the industrial Midwest the energy-producing areas that had done so well before oil prices fell.

Orgel played a clip of a recent speech by President Obama taking credit for the recovery of the economy, of the stock market and 401(k)s, and a decline in the deficit of two thirds, and Obama questioned how, given the record, Republicans can “take on the mantle of fiscal probity.”

He asserted that “it’s not an accident” that the economy does better under Democratic presidents.

While the president has taken credit on behalf of his party, a skeptical Orgel asked Zandi who, “in reality” is responsible for the job growth. Zandi replied that there are a lot of factors, but it is principally due to “the dynamism of American business,” which have reduced costs and become more competitive, as well as to “the underlying strength of the economy.”

He went on to credit both monetary and fiscal policies of Congress and the administration for contributing to the recovery, a “muscular’ response that is distinguished from other parts of the world, although he acknowledged that there were “good and bad parts” to the policy response.

With all the recent talk about tax reform – corporate and possibly personal – as a potential subject for legislation in this Congress, it is instructive that Zandi told a caller that the odds of action any time under this Congress and president are low. (One might draw an analogy to spring training, when many teams construct hopeful scenarios that are disconnected from reality.)

(Archived video can be found here.)