By Dan Calabrese ——Bio and Archives--January 30, 2017
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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.
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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Dan Calabrese’s column is distributed by HermanCain.com, which can be found at HermanCain
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