…of our economic “recovery.”

Here are some numbers, from The Walls Street Journal.

• GDP grew at a (preliminary) 2% rate in the third quarter…
• That rate means that growth for the first nine months of this year was only 1.7%
  • Slower than last year’s 1.8%
  • Which was slower than the year before’s 2.4%
• Consumer spending provided most of the third-quarter lift…but consumers can’t continue if the overall economy doesn’t grow fast enough to raise incomes faster
• The other big third-quarter growth driver was Federal government spending
  • Rose 9.6%
  • Overall government outlays rose 3.7% and accounted for about 0.7 percentage points of that 2% GDP increase
• Economist David Malpass calculates that growth in private output was closer to 1.3%. The private economy isn’t “doing fine…
  • Non-housing related investment contracted by 1.3%.
  • But business investment is a leading indicator of future job and wage growth.

Finally,

• [T]he typical growth rate at this stage of the previous nine recoveries (13 quarters) averaged 16.8%
• The rate for this recovery is 7.2%.
• That’s about $1.2 trillion in foregone output.