{"id":50165,"date":"2015-01-01T11:12:16","date_gmt":"2015-01-01T17:12:16","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/?p=50165"},"modified":"2015-01-01T11:12:16","modified_gmt":"2015-01-01T17:12:16","slug":"diminished-expectations","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/?p=50165","title":{"rendered":"Diminished Expectations"},"content":{"rendered":"

In 1981, Ronald Reagan had to deal with a fairly sharp, intense recession<\/a>, with some fairly intense “negative growth”:<\/p>\n

1981 Q04: -4.5895<\/p>\n

1982 Q01: -6.5220<\/p>\n

1982 Q02: 2.1923<\/p>\n

1982 Q03: -1.4300<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

For those of you who weren’t around back then? \u00a0It was a nasty little downturn, especially coming on the heels of the sluggish, stagflation-addled seventies.<\/p>\n

1982 Q04: \u00a00.3890<\/p>\n

1983 Q01:\u00a0 5.3465<\/p>\n

1983 Q02:\u00a0 9.4443<\/p>\n

1983 Q03:\u00a0 8.0625<\/p>\n

1983 Q04:\u00a0 8.5095<\/p>\n

1984 Q01:\u00a0 8.1868<\/p>\n

1984 Q02:\u00a0 7.2118<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Long before he started stretching the Constitution out of shape, Obama broke one other, less formal rule – really more of a truism: \u00a0as a very broad rule, sharp recessions, left on their own, tend to have sharp recoveries. \u00a0Reagan’s recession was a sharp, intense one, accompanied by the worst unemployment since the Great Depression (only tied in late 2009 by Obama’s recession).<\/p>\n

And Reagan got out of the way, and let the market heal the economy (except of course the defense sector – but then, that’s never part of the “free market”) heal itself.<\/p>\n

And it came roaring back much bigger and better than ever.<\/p>\n

Obama, of course, took office in the midst of another sharp, intense downturn.<\/p>\n

And six years later, he’s doing the end-zone happy dance as he claims a 5% growth in GDP.<\/p>\n

Now, let’s presume for a moment that that 5% “growth rate” is organic (although it most assuredly is not<\/a>).<\/p>\n

It’s six years<\/em> into a sharp recession. \u00a0 Left to its own devices – without “Quantitative Easing”, without “Too Big To Fail” and skyrocketing energy prices, without Obamacare – we should have been seeing much better growth than this…<\/p>\n

…in 2010 or 2011.<\/p>\n

But during the Obama Recession, like the Great Depression, the economy was left to pretty much the opposite of “its own devices”.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In 1981, Ronald Reagan had to deal with a fairly sharp, intense recession, with some fairly intense “negative growth”: 1981 Q04: -4.5895 1982 Q01: -6.5220 1982 Q02: 2.1923 1982 Q03: -1.4300 For those of you who weren’t around back then? \u00a0It was a nasty little downturn, especially coming on the heels of the sluggish, stagflation-addled […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[57,64],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-50165","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-economy-and-the-market","category-president-obama"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/50165","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=50165"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/50165\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":50167,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/50165\/revisions\/50167"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=50165"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=50165"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=50165"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}