GDP growth for Obama's final year? A measly 1.6 percent

If it seems like we've been writing this piece for years, it's because we have. It never changed the entire time Obama was president. Occasionally you'd get a quarter in which GDP growth would spike a little, but it never lasted. And by the end of the year, GDP growth was either barely above 2.0 percent or below it. And while Obama's defenders would cite the 2008 mortgage market meltdown and the subsequent "Great Recession" as an excuse, that never made any sense. GDP growth typically accelerates quickly after a recession ends and the recovery begins. And even if you grant their assertion that this particular recession was an unusual event, that doesn't let Obama and his policies off the hook when you look at a horrible economic performance in 2016.

And it's not just that it didn't improve enough. It didn't improve at all. GDP growth in 2016 was the worst since 2011, and that's with eight full years of Obama's policies in force. The results? They speak for themselves:

The U.S. economy lost momentum in the final three months of 2016, closing out a year in which growth turned in the weakest performance in five years, with the yearly rate down to 1.6 percent. That compares unfavorably to 2.6 percent in 2015 and 2.4 percent in 2014. The Commerce Department says the gross domestic product grew at an annual rate of just 1.9 percent in the October-December period, a slowdown from 3.5 percent growth in the third quarter. GDP, the broadest measure of economic health, was held back by a jump in the trade deficit.

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This was slightly down from economists’ consensus of 2.2 percent. But it is in keeping with the typical GDP increase of around 2 percent in recent years. For all of 2016, the economy grew 1.6 percent. It was the worst showing since 2011 and down from 2.6 percent growth in 2015.

And it's not as if 2.6 percent is a good performance. It's not. At all. But 1.6 percent is simply horrendous. And the crap sandwich of an economy we had in 2016 completes a most inauspicious record for Obama: He is the only post-war president to serve at least one term and not have a single year in which GDP growth topped 3.0 percent. He had eight chances at it, and he failed all eight times. That is simply pathetic. And even if you spot him the first two years because he inherited the Great Recession, you can't let him off the hook for the ensuing six - especially when he gave us a gigantic spending blowout on the presumption that it would boost growth. It didn't. Not even close. For all the talk you hear that Obama has presided over sustained growth - even if you ignore the three quarters in which we had negative growth - the fact remains that the growth we had never got any better than sluggish. Anyone who can't figure out why Donald Trump was elected president simply has to look at this economic record. The Democrats and the media tried pretty hard for eight years to persuade us that Obama had "saved the economy" or that we were in some sort of a boom, but regular people in their day-to-day lives could feel that this was clearly not the case. Wages stagnated. Labor force participation sank. Business growth stalled. We were all told things were wonderful and that if we didn't feel that, there must be something wrong with us.

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But it was the nation's economic policies there was something wrong with, and if you paid much attention you could pinpoint why that was. The Democrats saw businesses as targets, not as drivers of prosperity. If you were doing well, you became a scapegoat because other people's struggles were supposedly your fault. Ordinary people understood that their employers weren't their enemies, but you couldn't explain that to those in the White House. Hillary was an awful candidate for reasons we discussed here many times. But even a Democrat nominee who was more appealing personally might have had a difficult time in the current economic environment. And for all the shrieking about Trump's style and approach to the presidency, you don't see the public objecting to his pro-business, pro-growth policy agenda. It's what the nation has needed for a long time, and we were never going to get it from Obama. The result of his policies was eight lost years in which the economy could have grown at a health clip, but didn't. Anyone who blames the electorate for wanting to go in a different direction wasn't paying attention to what was really going on. Dan's new novel, BACKSTOP, is a story of spiritual warfare and baseball. Download it from Amazon here