It’s illustrated by Table S-12 Economic Assumptions from the White House’s Summary Tables, repeated below.

The table is hard to read; the money line is the third one, labeled “Real GDP, percent change, year/year.”  Beginning in the year 2018—just four years from now—President Barack Obama and his “economic” advisors predict our nation’s economic output—our GDP—growth rate to shrink from 3.1% growth per year to an historic low rate, and abysmal rate, to 2.36% in 2-019, and then to less than 2.5% after that.  And to stay at that abysmal level as far as the prediction can see.

This is the defeatist attitude of the Progressive.  1979 Presidential Candidate Ronald Reagan had a different vision [emphasis added]:

Someone once said that the difference between an American and any other kind of person is that an American lives in anticipation of the future because he knows it will be a great place. Other people fear the future as just a repetition of past failures.  There’s a lot of truth in that.  If there is one thing we are sure of it is that history need not be relived; that nothing is impossible, and that man is capable of improving his circumstances beyond what we are told is fact.

There are those in our land today, however, who would have us believe that the United States, like other great civilizations of the past, has reached the zenith of its power; that we are weak and fearful, reduced to bickering with each other and no longer possessed of the will to cope with our problems.

Much of this talk has come from leaders who claim that our problems are too difficult to handle.  We are supposed to meekly accept their failures as the most which humanly can be done.  They tell us we must learn to live with less, and teach our children that their lives will be less full and prosperous than ours have been; that the America of the coming years will be a place where—because of our past excesses—it will be impossible to dream and make those dreams come true.

I don’t believe that.  And, I don’t believe you do either.  That is why I am seeking the presidency.  I cannot and will not stand by and see this great country destroy itself.  Our leaders attempt to blame their failures on circumstances beyond their control, on false estimates by unknown, unidentifiable experts who rewrite modern history in an attempt to convince us our high standard of living, the result of thrift and hard work, is somehow selfish extravagance which we must renounce as we join in sharing scarcity.  I don’t agree that our nation must resign itself to inevitable decline, yielding its proud position to other hands.  I am totally unwilling to see this country fail in its obligation to itself and to the other free peoples of the world.

The crisis we face is not the result of any failure of the American spirit; it is a failure of our leaders to establish rational goals and give our people something to order their lives by.

We can, indeed, do better than that Progressive budget implies.  We just need to get the Progressives out of the way.  Beginning this year, but necessarily continuing in 2016 and the election cycles beyond.