Why the economy still feels like it sucks as Obama goes out the door

Obama's GDP in current dollars has grown 28.4% through 3Q2016.

Bush's grew 39% overall and 41.7% through 3Q2008.

If Obama's performance simply matched Bush's 41.7%, we'd have an extra $1.9 trillion in current dollar GDP right now.

But we don't.

You've been had: The 2009 stimulus has been repeated every year, accounting for all GDP increases under Obama and then some

The February 2009 Obama stimulus got added to Bush's 2009 fiscal year spending because Democrats controlled both the House and the Senate at the time. It was scandalous, but there was nothing Republicans could do about it.

But the same thing happened every year thereafter because the Democrat Congress and then the Republican Congress deliberately passed this prior spending in the form of continuing resolutions instead of through regular order, which meant nothing got debated and the status quo was maintained. That's the evil of CRs.

Both parties did this on purpose instead of debating individual spending bills because . . . THEY ALL LOVE HAVING THE MONEY TO SPEND.

The fiscal 2008 baseline outlays were $2.9825 trillion, to which the stimulus got added for fiscal 2009, and just kept getting added and re-added and re-added right through to the present (and then some) through the continuing resolution process:

2009: $535.2 billion ($3.5 trillion)

2010: $474.6 billion ($3.5 trillion)

2011: $620.6 billion ($3.6 trillion)

2012: $554.5 billion ($3.5 trillion)

2013: $472.1 billion ($3.5 trillion)

2014: $523.6 billion ($3.5 trillion)

2015: $776.1 billion ($3.8 trillion)

2016: $1.017 trillion ($4.0 trillion).

The giant joke on the American people here is that Republicans went right along with this charade the whole time Obama was president, even after they got control of both the House and the Senate in 2014. Almost $5 trillion in "stimulus" has already been spent.

And Trump wants to add another $1 trillion?

Meanwhile under Obama current dollar GDP increased . . . $4.1 trillion. All government spending. All totally phony. And overpriced at that: $1.21 spent for every dollar of that fake GDP.

Once again Rush Limbaugh is full of it about the late, great recession

Here's Rush on November 15th:

In the first place, this so-called recession, the worst since the Great Depression 2008, I don't care, folks, it wasn't! ... Democrats have lived off of this economic collapse narrative for eight years now, and it's horse hockey. The truth of it is that there hasn't been a recovery from it. ... Hell, the recession that Reagan inherited in 1980 dwarfs this one. I mean the thing that Reagan inherited when he became president in 1980, this doesn't even get close to touching it, how bad it was. ... This has really been a sore spot for me for all these eight years, is how supposedly bad that was and how Obama single-handedly rescued us from it, and it was all the Republicans' doing, and it all happened because of the Iraq war. ... We haven't replaced these jobs that were lost. They keep talking about the employment rate being way down, record lows, what a crock.

Rush doesn't remember the 1980s very well, when he was in his 30s. Without a college education and a long enough personal history to compare things to while experiencing the hard knocks of life trying to get his radio career going, those years understandably seemed worse to him than they really were. Honest people everywhere recognize it was that way for them, too. Unfortunately Rush still doesn't seem to be able to measure the 1980s properly let alone put them in their proper perspective economically.

Take first time claims for unemployment. Reagan's weekly average 1981-1988 was 406,000. Obama's  weekly average 2009-2016 (still unfinished) is 373,000, 8% less severe overall. But the averages around each recession peak are much closer in severity. First time claims 1981-1983 averaged 491,000 weekly, while claims 2009-2011 averaged 477,000 weekly, the latter only 2.85% less severe overall. Peak claims in 1982 averaged 30.1 million, in 2009 only 2% lower at 29.46 million.

While the Obama jobs recession was not quite as severe in terms of the persistence of high first time claims for unemployment, full-time jobs took forever to recover under Obama. Under Reagan they had bounced back almost immediately. In 1981 the pre-recession peak in full-time averaged 83.243 million. By 1984 that level had been recovered with 86.544 million full-time jobs on average. Three years, that's it. In 2007, by contrast, the pre-recession peak in full-time averaged 121.091 million, but it took EIGHT YEARS to recover that level. Full-time finally averaged 121.492 million in 2015. That's why it hasn't felt like things are looking up until this year, in 2016.

If you were an adult in the 1980s, you probably remember the Savings and Loan crisis from 1986-1995, but you probably don't think of the Reagan era as a period of widespread bank failures comparable with what we recently experienced in the Great Recession, and you would be right. Losses from such failures as estimated by the FDIC for the period 1981-1988 total $8.9 billion. But for the period 2009-2016 estimated losses from bank failures soared to $57.3 billion, 544% higher. Even adjusted for inflation the recent losses were well in excess of 200% higher than in the 1980s. 

Or take housing. The Case-Shiller Home Price Index fell at most about 14% from the late 1970s to the mid 1980s through the Reagan recessions. I remember my dad was pretty unhappy about it because he retired in 1980 and was sitting in a house he hoped to sell for more money one day, but the value kept declining. But that was nothing compared to what happened between 2006 and 2012 when the index tanked over 36%. The foreclosure rate averaged just 0.5% in 1980-81, but soared to 3.8% in 2008-09, an increase of over 600% in the rate. Many millions of people lost homes in the Great Recession, but they are nameless and faceless to Rush Limbaugh because to him things were much worse in the 1980s. But not in reality. I saw homes in foreclosure in my own middle class neighborhood in 2007 that I never saw back in 1980 in my dad's hometown.

Perhaps the best way to visualize how much worse the most recent recession was compared with the early 1980s is to examine quarterly current dollar GDP. You had one tiny blip in quarterly current dollar GDP between December 1981 and March 1982 when it declined all of $0.01 trillion, 0.3% that's it. The truth is GDP recovered the next quarter ending June 1982 and never looked back.

Fast forward to 2007-09. There were four quarterly declines: A decline of $0.02 trillion between 12/31/07 and 3/31/08; a decline of $0.29 trillion from 9/30/08 to 12/31/08; a decline of $0.17 trillion from 12/31/08 to 3/31/09; and a decline of $0.04 trillion from 3/31/09 to 6/30/09. The previous peak level in quarterly current dollar GDP wasn't recovered until a year later, in June 2010. It took almost two years, not one quarter as in 1982. All told GDP fell from peak to trough by $0.5 trillion or 3.37%. 

The recession of 1982 was child's play compared with 2007-2009. Rush just can't see it because he was already rich during the Great Recession.

Your guiding light in this time of tumult he is not.   

Hillary can't claim she'll continue the good economy because it isn't a good economy

From the macroeconomic point of view of GDP, jobs and homeownership, the economy under Obama has been a bad joke.

Economic growth is lagging, lagging I say, the horrible, awful George W. Bush . . . by $2 trillion. Current dollar GDP under Obama has grown a paltry 28.2%. Under Bush, the worst in the post-war until now, it at least grew by 41.7%. Obama should kill to have George Bush's economic growth, and Hillary probably will, by starting another war. Nothing boosts GDP like war-spending.

Meanwhile job growth as measured by monthly total nonfarm has slowed in 2016 by over 20% compared with 2015, to 181,000 new jobs monthly vs. 229,000 new jobs monthly last year. Is that a hopeful trend?

And if you think 2015 was so great, it wasn't. If the same percentage of the population had been working in 2015 as worked in 2007, there would have been 7 million more employed than there were. There has been a huge contraction in employment, which explains the GDP problem. Without work there is no product.

You can see this vividly in full-time jobs. Compared to October 2007, we have just 2.6 million more full-time jobs in October 2016 than we had in 2007. Think about that. Just 2.6 million more full-time jobs but population has increased by 22 million. After recessions, full-time has always recovered to the previous highs in 2-3 years, but not under Obama. This time it took 8 years, a terrible stain on the economic record.

Next consider housing. There have been 6.4 million completed foreclosures since September 2008 even as the Feds have done everything they can to get housing prices to recover, distorting the economy to the point that today the typical $247,000 existing home is unaffordable for 90% of individual wage earners. No wonder the homeownership rate, at 63.5%, has plunged to a level last seen in 1985.

In the end about all Hillary surrogates have to boast of is the stock market. Larry Kudlow featured one on his radio program this weekend doing just that. But estimates of how many Americans own stocks vary considerably. Gallup recently put it at 52%. Pew in 2013 put it at 45%. Shockingly, the Federal Reserve itself estimates it's more like 13-15%. In the best case only half the country is reaping benefits from stocks, and probably a lot less than half.

Those people who had the foresight to invest in March 2009 have done extremely well. On average the S&P 500 is up over 17% per year since then through September 2016.

But how have long term investors done, people who buy and hold in retirement accounts? Since the last stock market boom peaked in August 2000, they are up only 4.32% per year. That's almost 64% worse than the historical post-war performance of 11.9% with little upside on the horizon as the market has made new all-time highs and is obscenely valued.

Nothing Hillary Clinton is proposing looks remotely likely to improve any of these measures, except maybe by starting a new war.

My boy will be 18 next year. Please don't vote for her.

If Republicans had any brains they'd be pointing out that GDP is running $2 trillion behind Bush and employment 6 million

But no, they have their heads up their ass because Trump talked about grabbing pussy.

Which proves that Republicans don't care about the economy and the middle class, only about their privileges under the establishment.

Which is why they hate Trump, because he does care. 

Today's advance estimate of GDP for 3Q2016 at 2.9% actually looks pessimistic

The Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve in June reduced their forecast of 2016 GDP from 2.1-2.3% in March to 1.9-2.0%.

Today's estimate means the average report of GDP in 2016 is now 1.7%.

It'll take a lot more than today's 2.9% to get us up to 2.0% for the year.

Laugh of the Day: Chicom annual GDP growth rate 6.7% three quarters in a row!

Ah, the wonders of central planning!

Hillary present at the debacles: Housing bubble, Great Recession, Iraq War, Surrender to Iran, Doubling of the Debt, puny GDP . . .

Conrad Black, here:

Hillary Clinton, though she would probably be an improvement on the recent past, represents continuity of what has been the most catastrophic 20 years of misgovernment in American history. She was there, as first lady, senator, secretary of state, or candidate, for the housing bubble and Great Recession, the terrible drain of Middle East war that delivered most of Iraq to Iran and produced a colossal humanitarian tragedy, the doubling of the national debt in seven years to produce one per cent annual economic growth while 15 million people dropped out of the work force, and the terrible fiascoes of the abandoned red line in Syria and the cave-in to Iranian nuclear military ambitions with a fig leaf of (unverifiable) deferral. But she is an able person, still carrying the torch of feminism, and she isn’t Trump.

The share paying for their own health insurance has soared 22% since 2013, by about 9 million, while the number covered by employers has actually fallen by 220,000

So says the table from Gallup, here. The 3.9 pt. difference in the share fully paying for their own coverage since 2013 represents a 22% increase.

How many was that in millions of people, you may ask.

In 2013 there were approximately 190 million Americans 18 to 64 years of age. 17.6% fully paying for their own coverage was approximately 33 million people at the time. Fast forward to 2016 and the number is now approaching 42 million. Meanwhile even though the sample population is up 3 million over the period, the number receiving coverage from an employer has actually fallen 220,000 to 83.76 million in 2016.

And as everyone knows who buys their own coverage, costs have soared. My costs since 2010 are up only 67%, but that's only because I chose higher deductibles as time went by. My deductible is now up 300%. Same plan, but it would now cost me $10,000 out of pocket instead of $2,500 in any emergency. Apart from that, everytime I need routine healthcare, like seeing a doctor to update a prescription, or the prescription itself, or glasses, or my teeth cleaned and checked, it's all on me.

So it's no surprise that apart from coverage costs soaring, healthcare services spending in unchained dollars of GDP is up 19% since 2012, from $1.836 trillion then to almost $2.185 trillion annualized as of the second quarter now. That's an extra almost $350 billion being spent on actual healthcare services consumption in the last four years, all coming out of consumers' pockets.

Obamacare has been a disaster to the budgets of millions of ordinary Americans.

DNC finance director Jordan "no homo" Kaplan is out, returns to full time consulting

Story here, which of course doesn't mention his Wikileaks "no homo" fame.

GDP "anomalies" have been showing since 2011 that "the US economy is in serious, long-term trouble"

Jeffrey Snider, here:

The US economy is in serious, long-term trouble. We knew that very well by the volatile nature of GDP almost from the start (the big negative in Q1 2011, for example). Because orthodox economics is entirely obsessed with the economy that “should be”, it favors smoothing out what is truly pertinent texture because it isn’t directly cyclical by implication. What the mainstream needs is not to try to turn statistics into “ideal” numbers, but to actually see them for what they represent especially when they stray into unexpected ranges. From that perspective, weak quarters were not “anomalies” to be dismissed in a fit of confirmation bias, but rather warnings that actually explain how we got here and why everything from economists, especially“overheating”, was unlikely from the start.

After 30 pathetic quarters Obama GDP lags Bush GDP by 35%

Bush grew current dollar GDP by 41.5% after 30 quarters. Obama has grown GDP by just 26.7%.

Bush GDP grew by $4.34 trillion while Obama GDP grew by $3.89 trillion over the comparable periods.

Current dollar GDP in the last three years has been growing by an average of $596 billion year over year. With two quarters to go and if that average continues to obtain, Obama GDP will grow by $4.2 trillion total, or 29%.

Bush GDP finished up 39%.

Obama GDP is thus likely to end up lagging Bush GDP by over 25% in the final analysis.

Under Bill Clinton current dollar GDP grew by $3.77 trillion or 56%.

GDP bombs: 1.2% in 2Q2016 vs. 2.6% predicted, 1Q dialed back to 0.8% from 1.1%

Michael Savage is an idiot, says for the average American the economy's doing just fine

Wealth insulates this book-selling jibber-jabberer with a microphone from the facts, because he has no incentive to look into them.

Incomes are flat since January 2000, housing and other hard assets are sky high and out of reach for 90% of individual wage earners. Full-time jobs are barely 2.75 million higher in number today than they were in 2007. This fool doesn't have a clue what he's talking about.

Don't worry, though, tomorrow the economy will be terrible, and he might even notice because all he does is follow the headlines.

GDP revisions come out in the morning at 0830 hours, Eastern. That should give him plenty of time to think about it, being on the Left coast as he is.

But will he?

Obama still can't get it up: Seven years without GDP even close to 3.0, lags Bush average by 33%

Bush average 2.1125% v Obama average 1.4%

Losing the propaganda war: Foolish Rush Limbaugh's big Lewandowski problem

Rush Limbaugh let his partisanship for Ted Cruz show on Friday when he prematurely ejaculated all over the Corey Lewandowski non-story here and here before it became clear here and here that Michelle Fields is just trying to sell her boobs new book.

Friday was a very bad day for Rush Limbaugh and the other Ted Cruz propagandists.

None of them dared touch the radioactive bombshell Drudge stories showing Ted Cruz has been faking his Southern Baptist bona fides. ("If we don't cover it, it doesn't exist").

Limbaugh's attempt to make the Carson endorsement of Trump the story of the day instead of Cruz' lies about his background utterly failed.

And now the Lewandowski story falls apart.

But expect no mea culpas from Limbaugh or any of the others.

They're just a pack of weasels.

Trump fires FOX News

h/t tony h.

The inflation-adjusted price of the average prime slave from 1860 is $44,100, very close to the 2014 raw average US wage of $44,569

The average price of a prime slave from 1860 was about $1,500. Using the consumer price index, that's the equivalent of about $44,100 in 2014. The raw US average wage in 2014 was $44,569 according to the Social Security Administration.

The annual mean price of the labor of a slave from 1860 brought a return on investment of about 12%, and on a month to month basis about 14%.  In 2014, corporate profits before taxes came to 12.7% of GDP.

Total slave population in 1860 is estimated to be 3.95 million,  14.7% of the total white population.

See The Economics of American Negro Slavery by Robert Evans Jr. of MIT (1962), here.