GDP is not just a number
FRIDAY’S powerful gross domestic product report adds to the evidence that President Trump and his economic team have turned the world’s largest economy from a stale and stagnant one to an empowering and uplifting machine.
The second quarter’s GDP rise of 4.1 percent is the strongest number we’ve had in over a decade.
As an opinion-based columnist who practices his trade in the real economic world, I believe that the GDP is the single most important provider of individual liberty and economic freedom in America.
This is the primary reason I have always found it so desirable to have bona fide business brains in the White House as opposed to the traditional politicians who inhabit Washington.
Many on the left will argue that President Obama had eight quarters of 3 percent GDP growth. Unfortunately, however, his term was 32 quarters. His two-term average of 1.6 percent annual growth is the worst among post-World War II presidents.
Trump’s GDP number is a remarkable feat, since the US is now progressing on a strong upward trajectory after seven interest rate hikes from the Fed.
The raising of rates has been and is a good and completely proper thing for the Fed to do.
But Trump’s achievement is all the more impressive for its sailing into an interest-rate headwind.
Team Trump — now headed by the president, Larry Kudlow, Kevin Hassett and several others — is delivering truly remarkable legitimate GDP growth.
From good growth, good things do come. If a business is growing, it adds more people and pays its workers more. As businesses grow, their vendors and suppliers benefit and deliver more product or services, and they need to add more people, and so on down the uplifting line.
Everybody wins when we grow the economy — Democrats and Republicans alike.