Obama's Economic Growth Gap Now Tops $2 Trillion

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Revisions: The latest GDP numbers show that President Obama's economic recovery — already the worst since World War II — was even worse than previously thought. This isn't slow and steady growth, it's punishingly slow.

News accounts of the latest Bureau of Economic Analysis report pointed to the 2.3% growth in real GDP in the second quarter as evidence that the economy had "bounced back" and "continued the slow but steady recovery trajectory of the last six years."

To be sure, 2.3% growth isn't awful, and it does come after the BEA revised its Q1 estimate upward — from -0.2 % to +0.6%. But the real story isn't found in these latest quarterly numbers. It's elsewhere in the report.

As it periodically does, the BEA revised previous years' GDP numbers, and what it found this time is that growth in almost every quarter since 2012 was weaker than it previously calculated.

The result is that GDP growth from 2012 to 2014 was just 2%, not 2.3%. In dollar terms, the revisions cut more than $100 billion from the nation's economic pie.

It also means that President Obama has presided over an economic recovery — now more than six years old — that is far worse than all the previous 10 stretching back 70 years.

Even President Bush's recovery from the 2001 recession — widely derided by Democrats and the press for being far too tepid — was stronger that Obama's. After 24 quarters, Obama's GDP is up a mere 13.3%. By this point in the Bush recovery, GDP had grown 18%.

Looked at another way, if Obama's recovery had been merely average — that is, if it had kept pace with the average of the previous 10 — the nation's economy would be $2.07 trillion bigger.

That works out to more than $17,000 in lost wealth per household thanks to Obama's subpar growth.

When confronted with such dismal results, the Obama administration and its defenders will blame the recession, claiming that recoveries from fiscal crises are always slower. Leave aside the fact that multiple studies have debunked this claim — as the charts below show — Obama's recovery has vastly underperformed even his own projections.

Obama's fiscal 2010 budget, for example, pegged 2010 growth at 3.2%. Actual growth was 2.5%. Even now, Obama keeps overestimating the growth his policies are supposed to be producing. While slow and steady might win some races, when it comes to the economy, it means leaving millions of the most vulnerable Americans falling behind.

Average income among the wealthiest 5% of households has climbed since 2009, but it's dropped for those in the bottom 20%, Census data reveal.

The average length of unemployment is now 28 weeks — a month longer than when the economic recovery officially began way back in June 2009.

Millions have given up looking for work and dropped out of the labor force entirely. And millions more are in poverty and on food stamps than at the start of Obama's recovery.

How many of these people would say they're pleased with the "steady" snail's pace growth under this president? In our view, this is an intolerable economic situation, and one that would be widely viewed as such if someone other than Obama occupied the White House.

Read More At Investor's Business Daily: http://news.investors.com/ibd-editorials/073015-764333-tepid-gdp-growth-leaves-economy-even-further-behind-the-pace.htm#ixzz3hTYg0oDe
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