One message, 'It's the economy, stupid' pretty much delivered the presidency to Bill Clinton in 1992. In 2016, the economy is approximately 400% worse than in was in 1992, we're promised Hillary will deliver the same 400% worse economy, and no one cares-Powerline

8/26/16, "The economy grew a feeble 1.1% in second quarter," USA Today, Paul Davidson
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August 27, 2016, "Why Isn’t the Economy the Issue?" Powerline, by John Hinderaker

"At the New York Post, Carl Campanile and Danika Fears make a good point: “Hillary, Trump too busy insulting each other to focus on Obama’s weak economy.”

"Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump are too busy trading barbs on hot-button topics like race and immigration to discuss the economy, which has slowed to a crawl under President Obama’s watch. 

“The numbers are bad. There should be a concern about the weakness in the economy,” said Douglas Holtz-Eakin, a former ­director of the Congressional Budget Office. “I would have thought that the economy would be at the center of the presidential campaign. Instead we’re hearing about which candidate is more racist. It’s crazy. It’s sad.”"
 
How bad is the Obama economy?

"Commerce Department figures released Friday show that real GDP increased by a mere 1.1 percent annualized rate in the second quarter of 2016."
  
Barack Obama will leave office as the only president never to have witnessed a single year in which GDP growth hit 3%. Democrats tell us this is the “new normal,” that we should forget about the kind of growth that until Obama came along, we regarded as routine.
 
In 1992, Bill Clinton announced that “It’s the economy, stupid.” 

That was pretty much the sole theme of his campaign. He ludicrously claimed that the country was then experiencing “the worst economy since the Great Depression,” a lie that the press, to its everlasting shame, not just allowed but often endorsed. So what was the level of GDP growth that Clinton relentlessly denigrated?

According to the Bureau of Economic Analysis, the quarterly growth numbers for 1992, in chained 2009 dollars, were 4.8%, 4.5%, 3.9% and 4.1%. That’s right–the growth that Bill Clinton derided as the “worst economy since the Great Depression” was around four times what we are now seeing under Barack Obama. 

And Hillary Clinton promises to continue Obama’s anti-growth policies.

By rights, the election should be over. The Democrats’ chronically lousy economy should guarantee that the next occupant of the White House will be a Republican. Unfortunately, that isn’t the way things are turning out."

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Among comments
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It "would be racist" to say the economy is bad:

"Forbes Tuttle

By rights, the election would be over, were a Republican occupying the White House. The chronically lousy economy should guarantee that the next occupant of the White House is a Republican. But as we're experiencing version 7.0 of Recovery Summer the lapdog media touts with various renditions of "Happy Days Are Here Again," pointing out "It's the economy, stupid" would be racist. Unfortunately, that is the way things are turning out."
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Media's democrat partisanship is good for 10 percentage points in presidential candidate polls: (The GOP E--whom Powerline strongly supports--will fight hard for only one thing: To prevent their voters from getting the candidate the country needs.)

  

"Taylor Lake 

I think it was the same media guy – Pinkerton? – who declared First Citizen Barry to be "a god" who also said that the partisanship of the media arm of the donkey party was worth 10 percentage points in the polls. This story indicates that he has a point.

What's wrong with American "journalism" today is that the "referees" have become "players." All but one of them line up with one team. The earmark of today's donkey party, including its media players, is that their party loyalty overrides any other consideration. "Democrats will be democrats before they are anything else, including Americans" holds up surprisingly well when applied to the facts. In the specific case of the donkey media arm, they will cheerfully sacrifice even the pretense of objectivity and professionalism in service to their party.

The reason they're not even trying to hide their hypocrisy and double standards anymore is that they believe that they are on the cusp of final victory. All they've got to do is drag Evita across the finish line, and the rest will take care of itself. There's no point in saving your ammunition when you're this close; victory – a one-party imperial executive backed up by a "Right, boss" Supreme Court – means that your political opposition becomes impotent and irrelevant for good." 

[Ed. note: Permanent dictatorship of the radical left is exactly what Establishment Republicans want as well. We effectively have it now.]
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"Doug Schrader 

I sympathize with Hinderaker's lament of, "By rights,..." But that's become so redundant it's exhausting and almost not worth the breath anymore. That can be said about innumerable developments in politics and beyond for the last several decades. By rights, Hillary should be facing criminal espionage charges. By rights, the SCOTUS should have overturned Obamacare. By rights, Obama should have been impeached. By rights, the GOP should have embraced the Tea Party. By rights, the Democrats should be a permanent minority. By rights, Bill Clinton should have been convicted. By rights, OJ should have been convicted. By rights, the BLM movement would have been dismissed as a fraud. Etc etc etc. We need to start talking & thinking about what needs to be done, what we have to offer the country, and less whining about what should've happened but didn't."
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"Bill Snider ·

UT Law School 

What's wrong with the economy? Over regulation. The Fed can't fix it. The government is where the untalented go to gain the power to tell the talented how to do their jobs."

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GOP Establishment, via Daily Caller Senior Writer, suggests surrendering to Hillary, therefore a "perpetual dictatorship of the radical left." (No voters needed.)

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8/9/16, "#NeverTrump’s Weinstein Calls for ‘Negotiated Surrender to Hillary’," Breitbart, Joel Pollak 

"The Daily Caller’s Senior Writer Jamie Weinstein, a member of the “NeverTrump” faction, has proposed a “negotiated Republican surrender” to Hillary Clinton. The suggested deal rests on the assumption that Clinton is “on a glide path to the White House,” and that Republicans would do best to appease her now.  

The terms: Republican leaders agree to “rescind” endorsements of Trump in exchange for one Supreme Court seat; rudimentary entitlement reform (read: higher taxes); a “Gang of Eight-style immigration bill”; a federal minimum-wage increase; up-or-down votes on future Supreme Court nominees; and a few national security appointments.

There is no room for actual voters in this scheme, which Weinstein envisions as a brokered arrangement between politicians. Weinstein writes:  

"Ideally, the Republican delegation would include a wide range of respected Republicans and conservatives from both the establishment and anti-establishment, but for it to matter to Hillary, it must also definitely include Republican congressional leaders like House Speaker Paul Ryan and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (and as many other members of Congress as possible) who would actually be in a position of fulfill the commitments of a deal."

Weinstein concedes that one of his premises contradicts the other: if Trump is doing so badly, why would Clinton agree to a deal?

However, he says, “while Trump looks like he is tanking, you can never be so sure.” And he believes Hillary Clinton would accept his terms as a way of cementing her “presidential legacy” by “achieving some of her big policy goals before she is even sworn in.”

Weinstein does not explain how Republicans might be expected to oppose Clinton’s other policies once she takes office. Nor does he explain why, having surrendered once, Republicans would not be expected to surrender again, and again, and again.

Essentially, Weinstein is proposing that Hillary Clinton control, and ultimately destroy, the Republican Party.

But perhaps, if it keeps Donald Trump out of office, a perpetual dictatorship of the radical left is worth considering."

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Re: 1.1 GDP: 2Q 2016 US GDP revised down to 1.1% amid wider trade gap and 7.7% drop in housing construction. US economy has averaged only 1% growth for the past three quarters-USA Today, 8/26/16 

8/26/16, "The economy grew a feeble 1.1% in second quarter," USA Today, Paul Davidson

"The economy grew a bit more slowly than believed in the second quarter amid a wider trade gap and weaker housing construction, leaving its third straight disappointing performance looking even more feeble.

The nation’s gross domestic product increased at a seasonally adjusted annual rate of 1.1%, the Commerce Department said Friday, slightly below its previous 1.2% estimate. That matches the expectations of economists surveyed by Bloomberg. The economy has averaged about 1% growth the past three quarters, well below the roughly 2.2% yearly average in the seven-year-old recovery.

A sluggish global economy and the oil industry’s long-standing slump have pummeled U.S. exports and business investment. Those headwinds have offset strong consumer spending, which makes up about 70% of economic activity.

Last quarter, exports increased 1.2%, a bit more slowly than previously estimated, while imports rose 0.3%, up from the modest decline cited in the last tally. That widened the trade deficit, hurting growth. A strong dollar has made U.S. exports more expensive for overseas customers -- amplifying the effects of economic struggles in China and the euro zone -- while imports are cheaper for U.S. consumers.

Also, housing construction dropped 7.7%, a bigger decline than first estimated. And government spending fell 1.5%.

Business stockpiling subtracted 1.3 percentage points from growth. That’s slightly more than believed and marks the fifth straight quarter that paltry additions to company inventories have been a drag on growth.

On the bright side, consumer spending surged a robust 4.4%, a bit more sharply than first estimated....

And business investment fell 2.5%, less dramatically than initially estimated, in a possible sign that a prolonged slump in capital spending may be winding down.

This was the government’s second estimate of economic growth in the second quarter. It will release a third and final estimate in coming weeks....

The economy’s recent weak performances are among the concerns that could keep the Federal Reserve from raising interest rates at a mid-September meeting. The Fed boosted its key rate in December for the first time in nine years but has since held it steady."
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Added: Devastating news of drastic downward revision in US wages came on August 9 just days after the conclusion of the 2016 Democrat convention. Instead of rising 4.2% in 1Q2016, wages declined .4% per BLS Aug. 9. In 2Q 2016 wages fell another 1.4% per BLS. Since Dec. 2015, a 2% drop. In June 2016 before revision Obama told the world false 'good news' of 3% wage growth in 2016:

8/9/16, "Shock: Americans’ Wages Dropping Fast in 2016," Neil Munro, Breitbart

"Federal data released Aug. 9 shows that Americans’ wages are dropping again, seven years after President Barack Obama declared the economy had recovered from the property-bubble — and three months before the 2016 election.

The dramatic drop was buried in an Aug. 9 report by the Bureau of Labor Statistics, which said that officials have radically revised their prior claim that wages grew 4.2 percent in the first quarter, from January to March.

“Real hourly compensation decreased 0.4 percent after revision, rather than the previously-published increase of 4.2 percent,” the BLS admitted. Compensation also fell another 1.4 percent in the second quarter, from April to June, the BLS admitted in the same report. That’s 2 percent drop in wages since December.

Pay shrank 0.3 percent in 2013, rose a mere 1.1 percent in 2014, but rose a promising 2.7 percent in 2015, according to the BLS. The wage drop is a potential p.r. problem for Obama, who has been touting the apparent rise in wages since officials reported that wages grew 2.7 percent during 2015.

In June, Obama cited the mistaken 2016 wage-growth claim while arguing the economy was finally helping ordinary Americans. “Let’s get wages rising faster,” Obama declared in a speech at Concord Community High School, Elkhart, Indiana.

I also know that I’ve spent every single day of my presidency focused on what I can do to grow the middle class and increase jobs, and boost wages…Here’s the good news: Wages are actually growing at a rate of about 3 percent so far this year. That’s the good news. Working Americans are finally getting a little bigger piece of the pie. But we’ve got to accelerate that.  

That speech was advertised as his first speech of the 2016 campaign, and he continued his wage-boosting theme during his July 27 speech at the Democratic Convention;

If you’re really concerned about pocketbook issues and seeing the economy grow, and creating more opportunity for everybody, then the choice isn’t even close. If you want someone with a lifelong track record of fighting for higher wages, and better benefits, and a fairer tax code, and a bigger voice for workers…you should vote for Hillary Clinton.

But Obama’s own political priorities have helped force wages down in the job market, even as he works to deliver more benefits via government offices to lower-paid Americans."...

[Ed. note: Free trade deals are another major factor keeping down US wages. Obama's own advisor on free trade deals says: ""TPP does nothing for Americans....Companies are scouring the globe for countries they can get to produce most cheaply.” That, he said, results in constant downward pressure on American wages. “They may yield support for the stock-holding class but it’s not creating jobs.”" Quoting Michael Wessel...10/9/2015, "Wikileaks release of TPP deal text stokes 'freedom of expression' fears," UK Guardian, Sam Thielman in NY. It's simple math, no college degree needed. We're mute global slaves.] 
 
(continuing): "One huge cause of declining wages is the federal government’s decision to import roughly 2 million migrants and guest-workers each year. They compete for work against the four million young native-born Americans who begin looking for work each year. That one-for-two flood of extra labor creates a huge surplus of U.S. workers, which drives down wages.
 
That wage-cutting labor surplus is hidden by federal unemployment numbers which suggests that only 1 out of 20 Americans are unemployed.  But the reality is that the many Americans and immigrants who do not have a full-time job are slyly discounted in the official reports.

“In addition to the [6.9 million recognized] unemployed, 28 percent (48.5 million) of working-age (16 to 65) natives were not in the labor force … This is much higher than the 25.3 percent rate (42.1 million) in the same quarter of 2007 and the 22.9 percent rate (35.7 million) in 2000,”  said a July study from Steve Camarota, the research director at the Center for Immigration Studies, “

Overall, “55.4 million working-age, native-born Americans [were] without jobs in the first quarter of 2016, compared to 41.1 million in the same quarter of 2000,” he wrote.

In contrast, when immigration is kept low, wages tend to rise during economic growth. For example, wages rose sharply in the low-immigration decades between 1925 and 1969. Blue-collar wages also climbed in 1998 and 1999 when the fast-growing economy ran out of workers. Also, in Arizona, wages and research into labor-saving technology rose once many illegals were sent home in the mid-2000s.

Currently, U.S. agriculture companies are complaining about rising wages because many of their illegal-immigrant workers are migrating away from the farms and towards the cities. “We’re probably experiencing the most critical labor shortage” since 2002, complained Tom Nassif, president and CEO of the Western Growers Association, a trade association of agricultural companies who want illegal-immigrant farm workers to get work permits, perhaps via an amnesty deal. “Wages are going up dramatically… [the labor shortage] encourage[s] people who are farmworkers to play musical chairs by going from farmer to farmer, seeking higher wages, and the farmers are competing with each other by raising those wages,” he complained. 

Growing wages are a huge headache for CEOs, partly because higher wages shrink profits and slash stock values on Wall Street. 

Obama tried and failed to get a wage-cutting amnesty deal in 2013 because he’s willing to let Americans’ workplace wages stall if he can increase the Democratic Party’s power to deliver benefits via government.

Obama made that political strategy clear in 2006, when he admitted  in his autobiography that large-scale migration hurts Americans wages. “This huge influx of mostly low-skill workers provides some benefits to the economy as a whole… [but] it also threatens to depress further the wages of blue-collar Americans,” including blue-collar African-Americans.... 

But those brown immigrants would help the Democratic Party, he wrote. “In my mind, at least, the fates of black and brown were to be perpetually intertwined, the cornerstone of a [Democratic] coalition that could help America live up to its [progressive] promise,” he wrote in “The Audacity of Hope.”

Obama’s welcome for migrants is also rooted in his progressive views that Americans’ legal rights must be shared with all foreigners, regardless of their political beliefs, cultures or impact on the Americans’ wages.

In a November 2014 speech on immigration, for example, Obama told a Chicago audience that “there have been periods where the folks who were already here suddenly say, ‘Well, I don’t want those folks,’ even though the only people who have the right to say that are some Native Americans.”

“Sometimes we get attached to our particular tribe, our particular race, our particular religion, and then we start treating other folks differently…that, sometimes, has been a bottleneck to how we think about immigration,” Obama said, shortly after he announced his Oval Office plan to award work-permits to roughly 4 million additional illegal immigrants.

Obama’s combination of progressive ideology and strategy is why he has allowed 400,000 unskilled Central American migrants into the country since 2010.

He’s also provided a quasi-amnesty to almost 800,000 illegal immigrants since 2012, tried to provide a quasi-amnesty to four million illegals in November 2014, is bringing in 65,000 unskilled Syrian migrants by October, and pushed for the 2013 immigration bill that would have added at least 33 million legal migrants to this nation of 310 million Americans by 2023. Obama has also expanded the annual inflow of temporary “guest workers” from 700,000 per year to roughly 800,000 per year. 

In contrast, Donald Trump’s proposed immigration reform would reduce unemployment, drive up Americans’ wages and reducing housing costs, according to a recent Wall Street study that claimed to be critical of his policies."

 

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