Free Republic

When Donald Trump said last week that he will double the American growth rate, his skeptics scoffed. The left doesn't think 4% growth is possible, because they never came close to that target under Barack Obama. But there's no law of nature or economics that says America is doomed to anemic growth rates. We believe that with the right policy fixes, fast growth is not just possible; it's probable. In the 1980s, the Reagan agenda had quarterly growth rates of 6, 7 and even 8%. Over the course of his administration, the nation created about 2 million jobs per year....

"... the spike in exports - which curiously came a time of a stronger dollar - was the highest seen in over two years, and amounted to $49 billion in chainged dollars, or roughly 41% of the nominal $119 billion annualized increase in Q3 GDP. Where it gets even more surprising is looking into just what the exported commodity was. The answer: soybeans... So according to the US government Bureau of Economic Analysis, in the quarter, goods exports amounted to $41 billion of the $119 billion chained dollar increase, while Soybeans accounted for some $38 billion of this number. Or,...

The Detroit metro area has an economy that is roughly the same size as the nation of Chile, according a blog post by a free enterprise think tank. Figures collected by the federal Bureau of Economic Analysis show the Detroit-Warren-Dearborn metro area having the 14th-largest economy among the nation’s metropolitan regions, with a $246 billion gross domestic product (GDP) in 2015. To place this in perspective, the Carpe Diem blog from the Washington, D.C.-based American Enterprise Institute found that the Detroit area's economy is roughly the same size as Chile's economy, which had a GDP of $240 billion in 2015....

but there was no reference to the federal government data I'm posting. My simple colors and symbols are superimposed on the Bureau of Economic Analysis' data to show a crude "graph" of the economic recovery. Hover to see the table numbers. Funny thing though it disappears when you include the Reagan, et al. years (shown at link).

The Bureau of Economic Analysis (BEA) has dozens of tables. One is Contributions to Percent Change in Real Gross Domestic Product. I added color and symbols in front of the table data. Hover to see the column descriptions and table data. Well I saw what I remember from decades ago.

The U.S. economy expanded at a 1.2% annual rate in the second quarter, barely improving from Q1's downwardly revised 0.8% advance, the Commerce Department said Friday. Wall Street had expected a 2.6% pace.

Trump and the Republican Drama Obscures the Real Crisis The most important issue the new president will face continues to be sidelined. May 10, 2016 Bruce Thornton    Bruce Thornton is a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center. The Republican caterwauling over Donald Trump reminds me of the lyric from “That’s Entertainment”: “There’s no ordeal/like the end of Camille.” Jeb Bush, Lyndsey Graham, and Mitt Romney have announced that they will snub the GOP convention. GOP big donors are closing their wallets. Some pundits and politicians are contemplating a third-party candidate to prove the purity of...

The new normal: The economy is not good. The economy has not been good for the entire Obama presidency Businesses aren’t spending money. Neither are consumers. And while the unemployment rate is made to look good, record low labor-force participation tells a different story. The economy is not good. The economy has not been good for the entire Obama presidency. And while Democrats hope we’re getting used to horrendous news like this, we shouldn’t be: The U.S. economy grew at its slowest pace in roughly 2 years, climbing just 0.5 percent in the first three months of 2016.

U.S. economic growth braked sharply to its slowest pace in two years as consumer spending softened and a strong dollar continued to undercut exports, but a pick-up in activity is anticipated given a buoyant labor market. Gross domestic product increased at a 0.5 percent annual rate, the slowest since the first quarter of 2014, the Labor Department said on Thursday in its advance estimate, also as businesses doubled down on efforts to reduce unwanted merchandise clogging up warehouses. The economy was also blindsided by cheap oil, which has hurt the profits of oil field companies like Schlumberger and Halliburton, resulting...

While economists, politicians, and analysts point to current data points and primarily coincident indicators to create a “bullish spin” for the investing public, the underlying deterioration in economic prosperity is a much more important long-term concern. The question that we should be asking is “why is this happening?” From 1950-1980 nominal GDP grew at an annualized rate of 7.55%. This was accomplished with a total credit market debt to GDP ratio of less 150%. The CRITICAL factor to note is that economic growth was trending higher during this span going from roughly 5% to a peak of nearly 15%. There...

Many analysts had anticipated that a dramatic drop in oil prices such as we’ve seen since the summer of 2014 could provide a big stimulus to the economy of a net oil importer like the United States. That doesn’t seem to be what we’ve observed in the data. There is no question that lower oil prices have been a big windfall for consumers. Americans today are spending $180 B less each year on energy goods and services than we were in July of 2014, which corresponds to about 1 percent of GDP. A year and a half ago, energy expenses...

An auditor for the Government Accountability Office told the Senate budget committee that in the next 15-25 years, the amount of public debt will exceed all the goods and services produced by the entire U.S. economy.  Without action on the debt, the auditor said the percent of debt to GDP could rise to 200% or 300%. Washington Free Beacon: Gene Dodaro, the comptroller general for the Government Accountability Office, testified at the Senate Budget Committee to provide the results of its audit on the government’s financial books. “We’re very heavily leveraged in debt,” Dodaro said. “The historical average post-World War II...

Human beings have a restless edge, an impulse to tinker, to do things in a different way. And that fact is a huge and vital thing. Mankind is capable of original ideas, concepts that have not been conceived before—and those who attempt to suppress this create a prison of the mind and spirit. It is good to have books to read and a Rubik’s Cube to play with, but a prison it would nonetheless be if people couldn’t follow their own instincts and conscience. If they couldn’t leap into the unknown. That’s what business is all about....

...our model shows more growth from the Rubio and Cruz plans than the Trump plan, even though Trump proposed a larger cut: While Donald Trump largely opted for big rate reductions across the board, Rubio and Cruz made improvements to the structure of taxes, while cutting taxes by less overall. Senators Rubio and Cruz both put thought into the nature of the taxes that businesses pay. They noticed that the current way businesses are asked to calculate taxes creates a bias in the code. When a business builds something new, like, say, a new industrial lathe, that decision actually has...

(CNSNews.com) - The United States has now gone a record 10 straight years without 3 percent growth in real Gross Domestic Product, according to data released by the Bureau of Economic Analysis. The BEA has calculated GDP for each year going back to 1929 and it has calculated the inflation-adjusted annual change in GDP (in constant 2009 dollars) from 1930 forward. In the 85 years for which BEA has calculated the annual change in real GDP there is only one ten-year stretch—2006 through 2015—when the annual growth in real GDP never hit 3 percent. During the last ten years, real...

The U.S. economy unexpectedly expanded at a faster pace in the fourth quarter than initially estimated, reflecting a higher value of business inventories. Gross domestic product, the value of all goods and services produced, grew at a 1% annualized rate, compared with an initial estimate of 0.7%, Commerce Department figures showed Feb. 26. The median forecast in a Bloomberg News survey called for a 0.4% gain. Consumer spending was revised lower. Although the economy slowed in the fourth quarter from 2% in the previous three months, growth is projected to re-accelerate this year as consumers tap into the benefits of...

This year's Republican presidential race has generated an unusual number of unusually bad ideas -- Donald Trump on Muslims, Ted Cruz on carpet bombing, Marco Rubio on male footwear. It has also has produced one of the best: Jeb Bush's 4 percent plan. No, that wasn't his desired share of the vote in the Iowa caucus, where he got less than 3 percent. It's his goal for annual economic growth, which he argues would "restore the opportunity for every American to rise and achieve earned success." When Bush said last June, "There is not a reason in the world why...

By now, not even CNBC's cheerleading permabulls can deny that the US is in a manufacturing recession: in fact, it is so bad that even the staunchest defenders of Keynesian dogma admit what we said in late 2014, namely that crashing oil is bad for the economy. And yet, the "services" part of the US economy continues to hum right along, leading to such surprising outcomes as a stronger than expected print in Personal Consumption Expenditures. How can this be? Simple: one look at the chart below should explain not only how the "services" half of the US economy...

The U.S. economy slowed to a crawl in the last three months of 2015, new government data showed Friday, an indication of how tepid global growth is exposing new weaknesses in the nation's long and sluggish recovery. Gross domestic product, a measure of overall output, expanded at a seasonally adjusted rate of 0.7 percent between the months of October and December - just the second time in seven quarters that the nation has registered growth under 1 percent. The pace, in line with economists' expectations, shows an economy that is being driven by steady consumer spending but weighed down by...

China is set to report its weakest full-year growth figure in 25 years on Tuesday on the back of slowing output and sagging investments, troubling news that will likely dominate discussion at the European Central Bank and Bank of Canada policy meetings. Economists said the expansion of the Chinese economy was held back by sluggish domestic and external demand, weak investments, factory overcapacity and high property inventories, which exacerbated deflationary pressures in the economy. The poor figures bolster arguments for more Chinese monetary policy easing on top of the six interest rates cuts seen since November 2014 and suggest that...