"On Thursday we closed the book on the Obama economic “miracle” — and it’s a miracle we are not in a recession.
Last week the Commerce Department released its third revision for fourth-quarter 2016 gross domestic product.
The number came in at a paltry 2.1 percent, meaning that growth during President Obama’s final year in office — the end of an “Error of Hope” — landed with a big thud at just 1.6 percent.
There have been 13 post-WWII presidents, beginning with Harry Truman, who had the disadvantage of beginning in the aftermath of war in 1946, during which the economy contracted 11.6 percent — four times the contraction any other negative year since — and even he bested Obama’s economic record!
Truman, a moderate Democrat, also posted the two best years of growth on record: 1950 at 8.7 percent and 1951 at 8 percent, and there was no zero percent interest rate to gin up the economy back then.
Thirteenth of 13 presidents is no mild distinction. Obama had eight full years to enact a growth policy, while many of his predecessors never had two complete terms.
George H.W. Bush and Jimmy Carter had just four years each, Gerald Ford had less than three years and Richard Nixon had five.
I’m not the least bit surprised the Obama economy was a failure. I’ve chronicled it for more than seven years in this column.
Here are the average growth rates for each president:
- Johnson (1964-68), 5.3 percent
- Kennedy (1961-63), 4.3 percent
- Clinton (1993-2000), 3.9 percent
- Reagan (1981-88), 3.5 percent
- Carter (1977-80), 3.3 percent
- Eisenhower (1953-60), 3 percent
- Nixon (1969-74), 2.8 percent
- Ford (1975-76), 2.6 percent
- G.H.W. Bush (1989-92), 2.3 percent
- G.W. Bush (2001-08), 2.1 percent
- Truman (1946-52), 1.7 percent
- Obama (2009-16), 1.6 percent
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