Slow Growth Forever?

Just hours after Hillary Clinton promised to give the nation more Obamanomics if she wins the White House, the Commerce Department reported that the US economy grew at just a 1.2 percent pace in the year’s second quarter, about half the rate most economists had expected.

And even that growth came mainly from consumer spending: Business investment — the kind of thing that means new jobs down the line — is dropping.

Worse, revised data now show a grim trend: The slowdown’s been getting worse ever since it began at the start of 2015. The Obama era is now all but certain to be the first presidency to never see a full year of 3 percent growth.

Mind you, even the best of the Obama economy has rested mainly on just two big things: 1) the Federal Reserve’s unprecedented Quantitative Easing efforts, in which the Fed bought billions in privatesector bonds to goose the financial markets, and 2) the fracking revolution, which gave the US energy sector a huge boost before the global glut drove prices down.

Nobody really expects the Fed to have any more good tricks up its sleeve, and in any case QE did a lot more to help Wall Street than Main Street.

Fracking might boost US growth again when energy markets take their next turn. But Clinton says she’s anti-fracking, too: The Democratic base hates it.

Which leaves her with nothing — zilch, nada — in her agenda that credibly promises to boost the economy: It’s all gazillionaire-dollar tax hikes in the name of “fairness,” plus more free stuff from expanding ObamaCare to debt-free college.

Bill can’t really help: She’s already repudiated all his 1990s policies.

Yes, Donald Trump has himself slammed one of those policies, the NAFTA trade deal — but he’s strongly pro-fracking and promises major tax cuts to get businesses investing in new jobs, as well as serious reform of Obama-era regulations that make it even harder for any company to grow.

If you want the country to escape the slow-growth doldrums, something big needs to change in Washington — and only Trump promises change. Clinton just says she’ll get better results from what Obama’s been doing for the last 7½ years.