The Numbers Keep Going Down

This is an election season so all news reporting has to take that into consideration. Anything you read has to be checked against another source and then sorted through to figure out what you weren’t told. Sometimes it gets very frustrating. One of the items that has come up in this campaign is the U.S. economy. President Obama and Hillary Clinton say that it is great, and Donald Trump says it is not doing well. What do the numbers say?

The Washington Free Beacon posted an article yesterday that has some answers.

The article reports:

The U.S. economy expanded in the second quarter of 2016 with real GDP growing 1.1 percent, a lower rate than previously estimated, according to the second estimate released by the Bureau of Economic Analysis.

“The downward revision to the percent change in real GDP primarily reflected downward revisions to state and local government spending and to private inventory investment and an upward revision to imports,” the bureau said.

Real GDP represents the inflation-adjusted value of goods and services produced in the economy. The second quarter growth of 1.1 percent, which includes performance from April, May, and June, was an increase from the 0.8 percent growth recorded in the first quarter of 2016.

Second quarter growth this year was lower than second quarter growth in 2015, when GDP expanded at 3.7 percent, according to the Bureau of Economic Analysis.

“Today’s disappointing news that the economy expanded even slower than reported is another reminder that we cannot continue President Obama and Hillary Clinton’s failed economic policies for another four years,” said Reince Priebus, chairman of the Republican National Committee. “Economists say Hillary Clinton’s tax plan alone will slow economic growth, reduce wages, and kill jobs.”

We have had eight years of Democratic policies running the economy. The excuse given by most Democrats is that President Obama started with a mess because the housing bubble had burst. However, when you look at the roots of the housing bubble, you are a little less likely to blame President Bush for the collapse (see Burning Down The House. If in the future YouTube takes down the video, I have embedded it in various articles in this blog–use the blog search engine to find it and watch it.) It is time to let an experienced businessman try his hand at running the American economy. That is the only hope the American workers have.