THERE’S THAT WORD AGAIN: Investor’s Business Daily: Obama’s Legacy — 8 Years of an Unexpectedly Weak Economy.
The latest numbers mean that Obama’s economic forecasters missed their growth targets every year that he was in office. And, once again, economists who had been promising that strong growth was just around the corner — most recently because of a relatively strong third quarter — had to eat crow.
It also means that GDP growth has not exceeded 3% for 11 straight years. . . .
In dollar terms, if Obama’s recovery had merely been average, the nation’s GDP would be $2.4 trillion bigger. That translates into $19,000 in lost income per household.
Heck, if Obama’s recovery had managed only to live up to the forecasts Obama himself made at the start of each year — which always turned out to be too optimistic — GDP would be nearly $1 trillion bigger today.
Obama’s record on jobs tells the same story. On average, the number of jobs was 18% higher 7-1/2 years after those recoveries started. Under Obama, it was 10.9%. That translates into 12 million fewer jobs.
If you want to know why Donald Trump is sitting in the Oval Office instead of Hillary Clinton, here are your reasons.
In our view, the incredibly mediocre economy we’ve suffered with over the past 7-1/2 years is not the result of some mysterious underlying “secular” shift that makes it impossible to grow faster than 2.6%. It is the result of bad economic policies, most of which were enacted by Obama in his first two years in office when Democrats controlled Congress.
The good news for Trump is that the bar is set pretty low.