Sunday, November 6, 2016

Memo To The Next President: We Can Grow A Lot Faster

The 2016 presidential battle between Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump will go down as one of the bitterest in modern history, and polls show it's still too close to call. But regardless who wins, the next president faces a slow-growing economy with a host of problems.

The U.S. is doomed to be a mature, sluggish economy, creating little growth and few new jobs, some experts say. Can a new president restore the U.S.' once-powerful economic growth of 3% or more?

History and logic suggest the answer is yes. Repeatedly in the past, we've heard that the U.S. has hit a permanent plateau in growth — a limit — that would keep it from expanding faster. We heard it immediately after World War II, again in the early 1960s, the 1970s, the early 1980s, and in the 1990s. And each time, with the right market-friendly policies in place, a powerful surge of new growth ensued. This time is no different.

Since 2008, the U.S. has experienced what could be called the Great Slowdown — the downshifting of the U.S. economy from the 3.4% annual pace of GDP growth from 1949 to 2008, to just 1.8% since 2008. If that doesn't strike you as a big difference, think of it a different way: At 3.4%, the size of the U.S. economy doubles in about 21 years; at 1.8%, it takes 40 years — nearly twice as long.

http://www.investors.com/politics/memo-to-the-next-president-we-can-grow-a-lot-faster/

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