" wrote:
The part that I think is misleading is that it looks like the growth
in GDP was much less back in about 1950 when in fact it is a tad lower
now. Not a big deal, but it is better to use a graph that shows rate
of change rather than a chart that shows absolute magnitude.
Especially when you are talking about the rate of change.
The slope of the log based trend line changed around 1980 and
then changed again more dramatically Round 1999.
If you poke around on that site, you will see an option to show the
rate of growth in percentages. Which would be neat to look at. But I
can not get that to work.
You can't get it to show percent change on GDP because you chose
a log scale. Displaying percent change as a log scale would make
little sense. There is a way to get percent change of a
log scale, but that doesn't make much sense either.
If you want to look at percent change you should go back to
displaying a linear scale.
The economy is growing and at a rate similar to " normal ". What
seems to be a bit different is that we seemed to have a bit of no
growth between the end of the recession and before going to the "
normal " rate.
The economy is not growing similar to what it did prior to about 1983.
From WW2 until the mid 1980's the economy rebounded back from a
recession with a V shaped recovery of greater than 5% growth.
Those bursts of growth quickly wiped out the losses of the recession
Since 1983 the economy has atruggled to muster bounce back
to 3% real annual GDP growth after a recession.
http://tinyurl.com/6sqbqsr
There is a good argument to be made that the economy has
been in a depression since 1999. The only thing keeping it
afloat is a massive private sector stimulus ($24 trillion borrowed
in the decade before the crash). And then after the 2008 crash
private borrowing ended.
Now private sector borrowing is as dead as a dodo bird and when
the govt also stops borrowing it will be all over but the shouting.
The US economy is going to fall back into a depression as soon
as an effort is made to balance the budget. The politicians in
Washington understand this and the only way they will move to
a balanced budget is if they can get the public to
demand it so that the politicians can wash their hands of the
blame for the result.