OMG!! This Economy Has Been Even Worse Than We Thought!

This morning the Wall Street Journal (access requires subscription), in an editorial entitled “The Six-Year Slough“, revealed that the Bureau of Economic Analysis (BEA) has just released new, revised numbers on U.S. GDP growth from 2010 to 2015. The revisions were produced using new data and new analytical methods. The bad news is that almost every reading of GDP growth from Obama’s first year to the present has been revised downward,  as shown below in a chart produced by the Wall Street Journal using BEA data. On this chart are shown three records with the horizontal axis giving the year number past the beginning of recovery for that set of data. The blue curve is for the

Reagan recovery starting in 1982, red is for the recovery from the savings and loan crisis beginning in 1992, and the yellow curve is for the Obama recovery starting in 2009. As you can plainly see, the Obama recovery is greatly inferior to both the Reagan and savings and loan recoveries. The average growth rate during the Obama years has been approximately 2.1% per year. To make this point more concrete, the revised data had the components of national income, corporate profits, and personal income all revised downwards. The average annual growth rate of real disposable income in the 2011-2014 period decreased from 1.8% to 1.5%!

The farther away we get from the beginning of the recovery in 2009, the less excuse the Obama apologists have for blaming bad economic performance on what they inherited from George W. Bush. In fact, as we have noted elsewhere, we have a plethora of explanations from Obama’s policies themselves. These explanations would include as a minimum

• The bad economic effects of the “Affordable” Care Act, AKA Obamacare.
• The costs of new EPA regulations on electric power generation and water use. (See here and here and here)
• The bad economic effects of the Dodd-Frank Act. (See here and here and here and here and here).
• Miscellaneous other bad effects of the Obama administration. (See here and here and here and here and here).
• The bad economic effects of the Federal Reserve’s easy money policy. (See here and here and here)

On top of all this, the Obama administration is setting the stage for the next recession by inflating the real-estate bubble all over again. Their inflation of the bubble is all done with the connivance of the Federal Reserve of course

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