How our government is killing growth

The real lesson of the latest lousy GDP numbers is that American government has utterly failed to spend its way out of this economic downturn

Construction worker
(Image credit: AP Photo/Mark Lennihan)

America got some sobering news on Friday: The economy shrank in the first quarter of 2015.

A lot went into the 0.7 percent drop in gross domestic product (GDP). There was a bigger-than-expected fall-off in exports, low oil prices, and even the possibility that the data-crunchers didn't accurately adjust for winter weather. (Though if the data-crunchers didn't sufficiently revise the first quarter numbers up, that also means they didn't sufficiently revise all the other quarters down.) But more broadly, the decline is a reminder that seven years after the 2008 collapse, the economy still refuses to achieve a real liftoff. Even Justin Wolfers, who made the best version of the it's-just-a-statistical-hiccup case, called it an argument for "reduced pessimism" as opposed to optimism.

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Jeff Spross

Jeff Spross was the economics and business correspondent at TheWeek.com. He was previously a reporter at ThinkProgress.