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Last week, a dear friend of Accuracy in Academia, author M. Stanton Evans (1934-2015), would have turned 83. Although he focused most of his energies in his later years on researching and writing about the history of espionage and internal security in the United States, he had quite a background in economics as well, much to the benefit of his readers over the course of his career. Indeed, he studied under the noted Austrian economist Ludwig von Mises. On at least half a dozen occasions, I heard him outline what he saw as five essentials for a functioning economy. They...

(Note: The map above and post and table below have been slightly updated to reflect new, more complete, and revised state GDP data for 2015 that were released today by the BEA. The previous post was based on preliminary data through the third quarter of last year.)The map above (click to enlarge) was created (with assistance from AEI’s graphic design director Olivier Ballou) by matching the economic output (GDP) in each US state (and the District of Columbia) in 2015 to foreign countries with comparable nominal GDP last year, using data from the BEA for GDP by US state and...

Throughout the 2016 campaign and into the early stages of his presidency, Donald Trump vowed to make infrastructure improvements around the country. The promise was all part of his brand of populism — spend more money domestically and less abroad. America first. “We need members of both parties to join hands and work with us to pass a $1 trillion infrastructure plan to build new roads and bridges and airports and tunnels and highways and railways all across our great nation,” Trump pledged at a campaign rally in Melbourne, Florida, earlier this year. Given Trump’s Russia investigation toxicity, it will...

According to the fiscal analyst, income-tax collections declined this year for the first time since the recession due to lower earnings at the top. Many wealthy residents decamped for lower-tax states after Mr. Malloy and his Republican predecessor Jodi Rell raised the top individual rate on more than $500,000 of income to 6.99% from 5%. In the past five years 27,400 Connecticut residents, including Ms. Rell, have moved to no-income-tax Florida, and seven of the state’s eight counties have lost population since 2010. Population flight has depressed economic growth—Connecticut’s real GDP has shrunk by 0.1% since 2010—as well as home...

The U.S. economy is expected to grow at a 4.0 percent annualized pace in the second quarter based on the latest data on factory activity, construction and consumer spending released this week, the Atlanta Federal Reserve's GDP Now forecast model showed on Thursday.

The Bureau of Economic Analysis’s advance estimate of real gross domestic product in the first quarter of 2017, which was released in April, had the U.S. economy growing at an annual rate of just 0.7 percent. The BEA’s second estimate, which is “based on more complete source data” and which was released today, increases the estimate for the annual rate of first quarter growth in real GDP to only 1.2 percent. In the last quarter of 2016, according to the BEA, real GDP grew at an annual rate of 2.1 percent, while for all of 2016 it grew at only...

Growth: Economists are saying that a big problem the economy faces right now is a lack of available workers. If that's the case, then the welfare reforms in President Trump's budget would be a big part of the solution. A front-page New York Times article Sunday says that "the main economic concern" these days "is no longer a lack of jobs, but a lack of workers." The Times reports that almost a third of the 388 metropolitan areas tracked by the Bureau of Labor Statistics have an unemployment rate below 4%. As a result, the story goes on, there's little...

Media Bias: The economy's weak 0.7% growth in the first quarter was disappointing, to say the least, the worst gain in three years. But to the Trump-despising big media, it seems, it's really a sign of his failure. CBS and the Associated Press tell us the first quarter's "lackluster beginning ... marks the first quarterly economic report card for President Donald Trump, who has vowed to rev up the U.S. economy." The Wall Street Journal, which should know better, called the number "the broadest report card on the economy in the nearly 100 days since President Donald Trump took office...

The government’s official scorecard for the U.S. economy in the first quarter pointed to the weakest growth in three years, but the slowdown appeared tied to temporary effects that are likely to give way a rebound in the coming months. Gross domestic product increased at a meager 0.7% annual pace in the first three months of the year, down from 2.1% and 3.5% in the back half of 2016. Economists polled by MarketWatch had forecast a 0.9% increase. In recent trading, the Dow Jones Industrial Average DJIA, -0.15% and the S&P 500 index SPX, -0.15% fell slightly.

WASHINGTON – The U.S. economy turned in the weakest performance in three years in the January-March quarter as consumers sharply slowed their spending. The result underscores the challenge facing President Donald Trump in achieving his ambitious economic growth targets. The gross domestic product, the total output of goods and services, grew by just 0.7 percent in the first quarter following a gain of 2.1 percent in the fourth quarter, the Commerce Department reported Friday. The slowdown primarily reflected slower consumer spending, which grew by just 0.3 percent after a 3.5 percent gain in the fourth quarter. It was the poorest...

That alone is a newsflash. Usually, college presidents approach big government with their hands out. At the Cato Institute on March 30, 2017, Mark Zupan, president of Alfred University, noted that trust in government is at an all-time low. It currently runs at 19 percent, down from 66 in the 1960s. Dr. Zupan is the author of Inside Job: How Government Insiders Subvert the Public Interest, published this year by Cambridge University Press. "In the developed world, government now includes 50 percent of Gross Domestic Product (GDP) and 28 percent of the workforce," Dr. Zupan said at Cato. He notes...

The Atlanta Fed GDPNow Model inched up to 1.0% from 0.9% on Friday. Nothing much mattered since a week ago. The GDPNow model forecast for real GDP growth (seasonally adjusted annual rate) in the first quarter of 2017 is 1.0 percent on March 24, up from 0.9 percent on March 16. The forecast for first-quarter real nonresidential equipment investment growth increased from 7.3 percent to 7.8 percent after this morning's durable manufacturing report from the U.S. Census Bureau. The forecast of the contribution of inventory investment to first-quarter growth increased from –0.87 percentage points to –0.77 percentage points after last...

"While it may not be the very definition of irony, we do find the fact that the Atlanta Fed has just cut its Q1 GDP forecast from 1.2% to 0.9%, a number which if confirmed would be the lowest quarterly print in year, just two hours before the Fed's rate hike quite humorous. As a reminder, the number was as high as 3.4% one and a half months ago."

That's 370 percent of GDP, but hey, why change anything we're doing? Exceptional work here from economics writer George Melloan, a one-time member of the Wall Street Journal editorial board and an one of the few who really understands the role currency, interest rates and the Federal Reserve plan in setting the nation’s fiscal course. But within a piece that deals with a fair amount of esoterica, Melloan almost matter-of-factly gives us a jaw-dropping fact: This nation is absolutely drowning in debt:

The U.S. economy grew at a 1.9 percent annual pace in the last quarter of 2016, according to revised Gross Domestic Product data published by the Bureau of Economic Analysis Tuesday morning. Tuesday's report disappointed investor expectations, which were for an upward revision to 2.1 percent.

Two recent statistics on the performance of the outgoing Obama Administration do not reflect well on his time in office. On the one hand, the Obama years were the only presidential term going all the way back to FDR that failed to meet a 3% GDP annual growth rate for any year of his eight in office. Even the “malaise” of the Carter years did better. So too, did the Great Depression years of FDR’s 12-years at the helm. Despite the media’s portrayal of Obama as “one of the all-time greats,” in the Gallup poll of job approval ratings of...

Following today's extremely disappointing US GDP growth data, we have the final nail in the coffin of President Obama's economic reign. Not only is the average annual growth rate of just 1.48% during Obama's business cycle the weakest of any expansion since at least 1949, he has just become the only President to have not had even one year of 3% GDP growth. An average annual GDP growth of 1.48% during Obama's two terms... As a reminder to a few blinkered media types, this means President Obama's "recovery" has officially been the worst recovery in US history (despite adding almost...

President-elect Donald Trump's policies have the potential to trigger a new age in U.S. economic growth that could serve as a global template, according to a Deutsche Bank forecast. Gross domestic product growth would be double its current level under an agenda that cuts regulations across a broad swath of critical sectors, enacts tax reform that slashes personal and corporate taxes, and calls for at least $1 trillion in improvements for bridges, roads and other public projects. "This policy mix has the potential of reigniting productivity growth and raising U.S. growth potential," David Folkerts-Landau, chief economist at Deutsche Bank, said...

For the umpteenth year in a row, mainstream economists and analysts are once again planting the seeds of hope for a return to stronger GDP growth. The White House has hoped for it for the last 8 years, and now President-elect Trump is all but promising a surge in economic growth. Unfortunately, while promises are great, we must analyze the reality of attaining such a lofty resurgence.Let’s start with the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) and their projections for the next decade. This is shown in the chart below.There are several very noteworthy observations which need to be made: Real potential...

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....