As President Obama travels around the country at taxpayer expense to peddle his newest stimulus proposal, his Council of Economic Advisors has yet to release its 8th Quarterly Report on Obama’s first stimulus — you know, the one that cost a cool $787,000,000,000.00. Perhaps this is just a coincidence.
Or perhaps Obama figures that his sales pitch will go over better if people are encouraged to forget about his prior legislation, which has done a tremendous amount to take us deeper into debt and little if anything to spur economic growth. In fact, with Obama at the helm, we’ve experienced by far the weakest recovery from a lengthy recession in the past six decades. According to official government figures, average real quarterly GDP growth under Obama has been just 2.4 percent in the first two years (yes, it’s already been that long) since the end of the 2008-09 recession. That’s compared to an average of 6.2 percent during the six prior recoveries from long recessions and 4.7 percent during the weakest of those prior recoveries.
