By Dan Calabrese ——Bio and Archives--February 22, 2018
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“The stagnation of America’s middle class in the wake of the recession is much worse than believed, and government policy under President Obama should share some of the blame,” said Kevin Hassett, the chair of the Council of Economic Advisers, the lead author of the report and the president’s top economist. “One explanation for this historical slowdown is that Obama’s tax and transfer policies worsened the wound.” The nearly-600 page Economic Report of the President, released Wednesday, is the most detailed analysis of the economy and economic policy by Mr. Trump’s staff. By reversing the Obama administration policies, the report argues, the economy will be able to grow 3% a year over the next decade. “In recent years, the pursuit of alternative policy aspirations at the expense of growth has imposed real economic costs on the American people, in the form of diminished opportunity, security, equity, and even health,” the report said. Mr. Hassett said the report is also critical of other administrations, noting that trade deals of recent decades were “filled with concessions that relatively feckless negotiators of the past made to our trading partners.” In chapters on taxes, regulation, labor market policies, infrastructure, trade, health and cybersecurity, the Trump administration argued that its policies would provide modest boosts to gross domestic product that, when added up, would be sufficient to shift output onto a higher trajectory over the next decade.
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