Obama will be gone this time next year, but have we learned enough from the past seven years not to elect another socialist or a socialist who masquerades as something else?
Ouch: U.S. economy stumbles with 0.7 percent growth in 4Q 2015
We’re always told that consistent economic growth will get us out of all our fiscal problems. That’s not true, although it would certainly help. We recently told you that deficit projections for coming years are looking pretty scary, and even those projections depend on some pretty rosy assumptions about future economic growth.
The Congressional Budget Office is assuming 2.7 percent growth this year and 2.5 percent next year. Is that warranted considering that we’ve averaged just barely above 2 percent since 2010? The news that came out on Friday certainly isn’t encouraging. The gross domestic product sputtered to growth of only 0.7 percent in the fourth quarter of 2015 – which, for those of you keeping score, is terrible.
It also continues a pattern of uneven performance that has seen the economy swing wildly between decent growth –sometimes even above-average growth – and completely horrendous quarters like the one we just saw.
Yes, if we could grow at an average of 4 percent or more, it would generate a lot of new tax revenue and that would ease a lot of our fiscal issues. But under Obama (and I’m not even counting the first year of his presidency because he inherited a recession), average growth has been merely half that.
Some will try to blame the Federal Reserve Board this time because they finally enacted a long-overdue interest rate hike recently. But this horrible quarter was mainly driven by poor consumer spending, which wouldn’t be affected by an interest rate hike unless everyone does all their spending with credit cards.
Sort of like the federal government.
In my new book, The Right Problems, we deal with several priorities designed to bring about stronger economic growth. Suffice it to say, none of these are priorities of the Obama Administration, which continues to tax and regulate us into a sputtering economy that will occasionally tease the hope of getting rolling, but then always disappoints us with a report like the one we got on Friday.
Obama usually has some sort of excuse for reports like this. Two years ago they tried to blame the weather. This time they may blame the Fed. But over the course of seven years in office, you can’t get away from the one common factor that’s been present the whole time. Him. People like me have been saying for years that we need to get rid of the tax code, get rid of regulations, repeal ObamaCare . . . and it never happens because Obama simply refuses. When he had a Democrat Congress, they gave him what he wanted. Now we have a Republican Congress that has tried to repeal the worst of these mistakes, but he has his phone and his pen, and he’ll veto everything he doesn’t like.
Simply put, we have to do better than this. And we need new policies from new leadership if that is ever going to happen. We already know Obama will be gone this time next year, but have we learned enough from the past seven years not to elect another socialist or a socialist who masquerades as something else?
I certainly hope so.
We’re always told that consistent economic growth will get us out of all our fiscal problems. That’s not true, although it would certainly help. We recently told you that deficit projections for coming years are looking pretty scary, and even those projections depend on some pretty rosy assumptions about future economic growth.
The Congressional Budget Office is assuming 2.7 percent growth this year and 2.5 percent next year. Is that warranted considering that we’ve averaged just barely above 2 percent since 2010? The news that came out on Friday certainly isn’t encouraging. The gross domestic product sputtered to growth of only 0.7 percent in the fourth quarter of 2015 – which, for those of you keeping score, is terrible.
