Breaking: 2Q GDP growth only 1.7 percent; 1Q revised down to 1.1 percent

The Commerce Department has just announced the early estimate on GDP growth for the second quarter. Not good. It's only 1.7 percent, which is even worse than the paltry annualized growth of 2.0 percent we've been seeing throughout Obama's presidency. It gets worse: GDP growth for the first quarter, which was already downgraded from 2.4 percent to 1.8 percent, has been downgraded again to a mere 1.1 percent.

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That's horrendous! I wonder what the eventual downgrade of the 2Q estimate will ultimately reveal. But it gets worse yet. The Commerce Department has recently changed the way it calculates GDP growth, and the new method inflates the figure to make it look better than it really is. Under the old method, 2Q growth would have only been about 1.0 percent. Now we've discussed many times why this is: There are no pro-growth policies coming out of this White House. Even Obama's current proposal, which pretends to cut taxes on corporations, is really a disguised plan to take more from the business community while jacking up spending yet again. Obama knows he sometimes has to pretend to be pro-growth, but the truth is he is not, and the actual growth figures reflect that. GDP growth of 1.7 percent is simply terrible, but it's the new normal under this administration.

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