Wednesday, May 04, 2016

Not the kind of ‘historic’ that Obama was looking for


The Obama presidency will be historic because he was the first black president, a rather important accomplishment, to say the least.  
However, there is another historic headline that he won’t like, and it has to do with the U.S. economy:
Last quarter’s 0.5 percent U.S. GDP may indicate the nation’s economy is even weaker than it appears. The economy of the United States’ recent 0.5 percent growth rate is the latest in a steady declining U.S. GDP growth trend over the past year. 
In the previous fourth quarter 2015, the U.S. economy grew 1.4 percent, which was down from the preceding quarter’s growth of 2 percent and before that 3.9 percent.  So the U.S. economy appears to be slowing rapidly over the past year.
Over an even longer period of more than eight years, since the previous peak growth in late 2007, the U.S. economy has grown by a cumulative total of only 10.1 percent.  
That’s a paltry annual growth of only 1.2 percent a year on average for the past 8+ years.
Yes, it will be historic to be remembered as the “1.2%” annual growth president!    
The Obama supporters will correctly argue that he inherited a recession, and he did. They will even call it “The Great Recession”!  
However, we are now in year eight of the Obama presidency and there are few signs that his policies worked.   
On the contrary, it looks like they didn’t. Just ask the people going to Senator Sanders’ rallies. It’s not an overreach to say that the Obama economy created the Sanders phenomenon.
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