When Brooklyn had its beloved Dodgers, residents coped with disappointment with this oft-repeated declaration: “Wait ’til next year!”
Today’s economists have their own version. Amid a five-year economic recovery that’s never quite taken off, they say, “Wait ’til next quarter.”
Now we’re going through another round as the Commerce Department announced Thursday the economy contracted by a rate of 1 percent in this year’s first quarter.
That’s worse than what experts had expected, the result of a big downward adjustment to investment in inventory. As economists will also point out, inventory growth is among the most volatile numbers in the quarterly GDP assessments; a bad number in one quarter doesn’t necessarily mean another bad number in the next quarter.
Experts split on the diagnosis. The right leans to saying the lackluster growth we’ve had is a result of clear anti-growth policies pursued by the Obama White House, e.g., the refusal to let the Keystone Pipeline go ahead.
Meanwhile, the left argues the stimulus simply wasn’t big enough to do the job, and they want more.
Which leaves President Obama all by his lonesome. He rejects the right’s policy prescriptions. But he’s also strangely ambivalent about the spending.
Though he claims his stimulus worked, he’s not pushing for more. We’re reluctant to draw broad conclusions from one quarter’s figures.
But at a time when his party is fighting to keep control of the Senate, the number sure leaves the president in a fix: No explanation for why the economy is growing so slowly, and no solutions for accelerating it.