The Obama Discount: GDP On Sale

Lies, damned lies and statistics. You'll hear a lot of them this week at the Democrat Obama convention.

When it comes to the economy, 42+ months of 8+% unemployment should speak for itself, but the Dems still try to spin it as some sort of victory. When you've lost the "fact checkers", though, maybe you need a new spin.

Given that job growth is a byproduct of a growing economy, the reason we're stuck in the doldrums is clear. Coblogger emeritus Geoff did the math so you don't have to.

Yes, folks, the economy had already started to turn around in the quarter before President Obama took office. The healing had begun before the Stimulus package, and before he started propping the economy up with huge deficit spending.

...

Team Obama consistently frames an argument that presumes GDP would have continued plummeting if not for the intervention of King Putt and his band of Keynesians. But that's ridiculous. There's an enormous base level of economic activity that was always going to be reached once the panic was over. Further, a recessionary contraction in GDP tends to overshoot the mark and then bounces back sharply to get back to the previous growth path.

As Geoff points out, Team Obama always whines about what they "inherited" from the previous administration, when in fact they inherited this bounce. They should've been off to the races.

But instead they smothered the bounce in its crib by making the ill-conceived "stimulus" a permanent part of the spending baseline, enacting a huge new entitlement, screwing over GM's bondholders, conducting an all-out war on energy production, etc., etc. ...

So now the U.S. trades at a discount.

This is the real Obama record on the economy, no matter what they say in Charlotte this week.

posted by Andy at 08:36 AM

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