Authored by Michael Snyder via The Economic Collapse blog,
Even though I write about our ongoing long-term economic collapse every day, I didn’t realize that things were this bad. In this article, I am going to show you that the average rate of growth for the U.S. economy over the past 10 years is exactly equal to the average rate that the U.S. economy grew during the 1930s. Perhaps this fact shouldn’t be that surprising, because we already knew that Barack Obama was the only president in the entire history of the United States not to have a single year when the economy grew by at least 3 percent. Of course the mainstream media continues to push the perception that the U.S. economy is in “recovery mode”, but the truth is that this current era has far more in common with the Great Depression than it does with times of great economic prosperity.
Earlier today I came across an article about President Trump’s new budget from Fox News, and in this article the author makes a startling claim…
The hard fact is that the past decade’s $10 trillion in deficit spending has produced the worst economic growth as measured by Gross Domestic Product in our nation’s history. You read that right, in the past decade our nation’s economy grew slower than even during the Great Depression. This stagnant, new normal, low-growth economy is leaving millions of working age people behind who have given up even trying to participate, and has led to a malaise where many doubt that the American dream is attainable.
When I first read that, I thought that this claim could not possibly be true. But I was curious, and so I looked up the numbers for myself.
What I found was absolutely astounding.
The following are U.S. GDP growth rates for every year during the 1930s…
1930: -8.5%
1931: -6.4%
1932: -12.9%
1933: -1.3%
1934: 10.8%
1935: 8.9%
1936: 12.9%
1937: 5.1%
1938: -3.3%
1939: 8.0%
When you average all of those years together, you get an average rate of economic growth of 1.33 percent.
That is really bad, but it is the kind of number that one would expect from “the Great Depression”.
So then I looked up the numbers for the last ten years…
2007: 1.8%
2008: -0.3%
2009: -2.8%
2010: 2.5%
2011: 1.6%
2012: 2.2%
2013: 1.7%
2014: 2.4%
2015: 2.6%
2016: 1.6%
When you average these years together, you get an average rate of economic growth of 1.33 percent.
I thought that was a really strange coincidence, and so I pulled up my calculator and ran all of the numbers again and I got the exact same results.
The 1930s certainly had more big ups and downs, but the average rate of economic growth during that decade was exactly the same as we have seen over the past 10 years.
And of course the early 1940s turned out to be a boom time for the U.S. economy, while it appears that our rate of economic growth is actually slowing down. As I noted yesterday, U.S. GDP growth during the first quarter of 2017 was just 0.7 percent.
But you don’t hear any talk like this on the mainstream news, do you?
Instead, they tell us that everything is just peachy.
I often wonder what things would be like right now if Barack Obama and his minions in Congress had not added more than 9 trillion dollars to the national debt. By stealing all of that money from future generations of Americans and spending it now, Obama was able to artificially prop up the U.S. economy. If we were able to go back and remove 9 trillion dollars of government spending from the economy over the past 8 years, we would be in a rip-roaring economic depression right now. For an extended analysis of this, please see my previous article entitled “The Shocking Truth About How Barack Obama Was Able To Prop Up The U.S. Economy”…
But even though we have been adding more than a trillion dollars to the national debt each year, and even though the Federal Reserve pushed interest rates all the way to the floor during the Obama era, the U.S. economy has not grown by three percent or more on an annual basis since 2005.
When you take an honest look at the numbers, there is no way that anyone can possibly claim that the U.S. economy is doing well. The best that you can say is that we have been staving off a complete economic meltdown and another Great Depression, but of course the measures that our leaders have been taking to do this have just been making our long-term problems even worse.
I feel bad for President Trump, because he has inherited the biggest economic mess in U.S. history. When we finally reach the point when it is impossible to artificially prop up the U.S. economy any longer, he is going to get most of the blame, but he won’t deserve it.
It is not going to be possible for Trump or anyone else to fix our system, because it was fundamentally flawed from the very beginning. The Federal Reserve was designed to create an endless spiral of government debt, and since the day it was created the U.S. national debt has gotten more than 5000 times larger and the value of the U.S. dollar has declined by about 98 percent.
If we truly want to fix the economy, the Federal Reserve must be abolished. If I was President Trump, I would look to start issuing debt-free U.S. currency just like President Kennedy did in 1963 as soon as possible.
In addition, we need to push tax rates as low as possible. Personally, I would like to see the day when the personal income tax is completely eliminated and the IRS is shut down. The greatest period of economic growth in all of U.S. history was when there was no income tax and no Federal Reserve. America once thrived in such an environment, and I believe that we can do it again.
Of course we need to also dramatically reduce the size and scope of the federal government. Our founders intended to create a very limited federal government, but instead the left has just kept pushing to make it larger and larger.
Businesses all over America are being strangled to death by mountains of federal regulations, and if we could just get the government off of their backs the business community could start thriving again. There are quite a few government agencies that could be shut down entirely, and I think that the EPA would be a good place to start.
Once upon a time the United States showed the world the power of free markets and capitalism, and if we want to make America great again, we should go back and do the things that made America great in the first place.
But would the American people be willing to go down that path?
Great article, Admin. No income tax, no Federal Reserve and a very limited Federal government. What a concept. One can dream.
Yes. Great article. Here’s a sample from the North Country of the once great state of New York.
I live in a small town in the Northern Adirondacks, which I will not name. The economy is SO great that Main street looks like something from one of those great plains ghost towns that are on the auction block. Virtually every store front is empty, and more are soon to close. Yup-the economy is “booming?” Really?? In the last few years we have lost the dentist, doctor(40 years of service) and recently the pharmacist (45 years of service) due to the ACA. More to come. Yup–the economy is absolutely booming! A dead town is proof that politicians have a grip on what is ailing those struggling to survive. Long Live The King!
The only difference is that today we have utterly massive money printing to make the rich whole, and then some. Is it a better solution? Well in a deflation it is probably better to have inflation rather than deflation. It just means the rich get richer and the poor get poorer. But the poor did vote for it by voting for Obama and incumbent after incumbent. A better informed electorate would have forced the Fed to inflate by giving everyone the exact same amount of newly printed dollars. (Roughly $40000 per household.) Of course the velocity of that type of printing would have resulted in a massive inflationary spike that wouldnt have stayed confined to health care and college tuition. A mere $6000 printed and given to every household would have produced a larger spike in GDP than giving all this money to the rich.
For someone who runs an economics blog, your inability to calculate compounding growth is pretty sad. Arithmetic means do not apply here. If you run the numbers correctly, which is to say compound the growth over the respective time periods and then take the tenth root, you get the actual average annual growth. Don’t worry, I did your homework for you:
Total growth over the 30s: 10.1%
Average annual growth: 0.97%
Total growth over ’07-’16: 14.0%
Average annual growth: 1.32%
So no, the last decade wasn’t as bad as the Great Depression. That said, Obama was still a terrible president and we should end the Federal Reserve.
Thanks. I was about to do the same, but you beat me to it. If something goes down by 50% one year and up by 50% the next, you’re not back where you started, you’re at 75% of where you started.
Welcome to the invisible DEPRESSION hidden behind plastic EBT cards in lieu of soup lines and 100 million non-workers getting assistance instead of being thrown to the streets. The Fed printed the monopoly money to hide this depression which could not have been done in the GREAT DEPRESSION when our money was backed by metal.
It’s a big show and you can’t see it (Anon, that means you).
The unemployment rate keeps going down, while the number not in the work force goes up. Soon nobody will be working, and we will have 0% unemployment!
We may be in a transitional phase, or shit-out-of-luck phase. The industrial revolution is over. The tech revolution is just about over. We need something new, that will create another revolution, to create jobs and fuel the economy. It’s not solar panels, nor electric cars, nor self driving cars, nor colonizing Mars. I believe we are SOL.
Von Mesis was very leery of indexes. He did not believe in them.
How can you measure growth with millions of products and services that all are changing prices relative to one another; especially technology items that come down in price fast. It sounds like mental masturbation to me.
GDP is a fantasy measurement used only to justify how much debt we have.
+1000 Flying Monkey. This was a great article, but the problem with the calculations is not the dubious growth comparison figures presented, it is the base. GDP is measured in currency. Currency is not a fixed value, consistent over time. With the Feds printing, there is no way to use currency as a baseline, since a dollar of yesterday was more “potent” than a dollar today. It is like year old medicine. It looks the same, but its potency is greatly diminished. A better measure would be a unit of energy, such as a Joule, or a barrel of oil, or some other fixed amount, that could be baselined properly, and not lose potency of use over time.
I don’t even need to do the math to see what is happening. Most (thinking) people don’t. The article is dead on that the Fed, Taxation on income and government interference being eliminated would give us temporary pain, as government, healthcare and MIC drones – er “workers” would have to adjust to actually having to produce something of value, but after that adjustment, it would be a near 19% (at least) adjustment upwards of GDP, and a sustained growth period. Don’t believe it, look up the depression of 1920-1921. This is why you always see a stick save during the supposed government shutdown nonsense. They know damn good an well, if they actually shut it down, no one would notice, and in fact would notice their standard of living actually going up.
Any figures from a federal agency has ZERO credibility so 1.33% growth is probably more like a negative double digit lack of growth !
Face facts the liberal left in control of this country were not going to make the first Black President look bad on any front ! Regardless of how moronic any of his unworkable policies are they will tag him a success and any intelligent argument will be meet with the RACISM CARD . Even though he is half white the stupid black half got a Nobel prize for showing up . We were doomed economically without a war somewhere before Obama and he and his ILK only made the mess worse !
Good old Ron Paul warned us , John F Kennedy warned us and Dewigt D Eisinhauer warned us and the idiots in charge drove us off the cliff . As they sang combiya
The difference is the soup lines of yesterday are the ebt cards of today. The men of the depression were willing to work, today they riot for an Obama phone and lobby for internet access to become a utility so they get that paid for along with their section 8 housing and power bills. Let’s not forget the gas cards they get $35 per week ( I never knew this until a thug approached me at a gas station demanding I give him $20 cash for the $35 gas certificate). I simply stated “molon Labe” and he said he didnt speak Spanish and I said you should speak Latin or it may get you dead quick like so get the fuck away from me. During the depression we had patriotism and religion, today we have black guys parading as white women that identify as a tree and want to be called a humanist. Today Satan is blantantly (along with Islam) paraded, while God is condemned everywhere. Your rights were taken seriously in 1930 today they prosecute every legal gun owning citizen that uses a gun in self defense in order to fear and intimidate anyone from owning a weapon…..they parade you in the public eye, you lose your job, call you a racist or nutjob, destroy your finances all because you were trying to pay some tax when buying a Twinkie and got mugged. You did get the last word however and it cost you dearly. But you lived…..today somehow just because of a white skin color its perfectly ok to have racism against you, be discriminated against, and tv shows against men or white men all while everyone labels every white with white privilege, although federal law legally provides for a “black advantage” called affirmative action, college scholarships only because of race……I could name 27 other LAWS that actually discriminate in a “privilege” or “advantaged” way to any and all non whites and illegal aliens. Oh and my tax dollars provide social security and welfare to any and all illegals since it is racist to ask for citizenship when they apply. I get sued by hospitals and taxed by Obama for not buying healthcare and having babies, all while illegals cross out borders and immediately birth another illegal, free mind you, making a new natural born citizen and defaulting the mom to allow the mother to be granted Obama amnesty. When are the hard working patriots going to go on strike and decide to come together and remove their white kids from colleges for a year, stop buying shit, file for an extension on taxes, squeeze out the corporations, the IRS, and liberal colleges and say Atlas Shrugged for a year to collectively say a big fuck you world, we are in charge! To say or ask if the Feds will pay for a voter ID card and without it you DONT GET TO VOTE, period. The demoncrats will shit …..recently after a 3 year lawsuit 3 Virginia counties sought jury duty information…those claiming they were non citizens and could not be on the jury were cross referenced with registered voting records and that voted. Of the 5,213 found over 2,800 actually voted. Obama using executive order for 8 years refused to allow the fed govt to release this info, hence the lawsuits…..there are many ways to cross reference but the Feds squash it. There is a deep state and Obama stayed in Washington to run it. If you think he is gone you are crazy. Same with Hitlery. I still wonder who they will try and ram down our throats in 2020….I am keeping a sharp eye out for Chelsea…the poster child for BLM an non working 26 yr old in moms basement. We will literally be voting and fighting against our own kids or their generation……we gen x ain’t gonna take their shit…..just a matter of time before this delayed reset takes its toll…the rot will create a disease economically that will end this republic in great fashion and possible fanfare with snowflakes sporting their new Che Guevara t-shirts.
Molon labe eez not spanish and eez not latin seeyor eez greek.