The real GDP report is out and it looks better than a month ago: +3.3% seasonally-adjusted annual rate for the second estimate for 2Q2025, instead of +3.0% in the first estimate.
But the big picture changes only microscopically.
From the second quarter of 2017, the year when Trump's tax reform became law on December 22nd, until now real GDP has grown at a compound annual rate of 2.466%, instead of 2.456% last month. For the seventy years before that, the compound annual rate of growth was 3.182%.
Trump's so-called pro-growth tax reform falls short of the previous seventy years this month by 22.5% vs. by 22.8% last month.
Now made permanent as of the Fourth of July, or so they say, the Trump tax reform is likely to continue to, shall we say, weigh on things.
The problem remains the lingering after effects of the Great Recession, the Great Financial Crisis, the Housing Bubble, whatever you want to call it.
The Trump tax reform of 2017 didn't do anything to address that meaningfully, just as Obama never addressed it meaningfully, nor Biden.
The rupture with the past occasioned by 2008 is the elephant in the living room, and the Uniparty just pretends it isn't there.
From 2Q2008 to 2Q2025, the compound annual rate of real GDP growth has been 1.995% vs. 1.990% last month, vs. 3.421% for the sixty-one years prior to that, starting in 2Q1947.
America is still 41.68% behind that this month vs. 41.8% behind that last month.
It's . . . depressing.
