By Robert Laurie ——Bio and Archives--April 30, 2014
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Personal consumption grew by 3.0%, about half of which was due to the growth in health-care spending, said Ian Shepherdson, chief economist for Pantheon Macroeconomics. "If health-care spending had been unchanged, the headline GDP growth number would have been -1.0%," Shepherdson said.Basically, the government forced people - at the point of the IRS gun - to spend their money on insurance, resulting in a federally-mandated spending surge in the healthcare arena. Everything else is essentially stagnant or shrinking. This may be (at least partially) due to the fact that, when you're forced to drop cash on your new, improved, and far more expensive policy, you have less discretionary cash to spend elsewhere. That's particularly true in lower and middle class families - the very people the ACA was supposed to help the most. Bottom line? Democrat strategists who've warned campaigning politicians not to use the word "recovery" are right to do so. No recovery exists. The ACA is - just barely - propping up growth at the expense of everything else. So, just how bad is the 0.1% number that the glorious institution of ObamaCare has given us? Well, it's so bad that the folks at CNBC thought it was a misprint.
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