Recession worse than we thought - The Rachel Maddow Show
source: http://maddowblog.msnbc.msn.com/_news/2010/07/30/4785203-recession-worse-than-we-thought
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http://maddowblog.msnbc.msn.com/_news/2010/07/30/4785203-recession-wo...
Every three months, the U.S. government adds up all the spending and buying and investing in the nation. The Bureau of Economic Analysis totes up those figures as the gross domestic product or GDP, and uses that result to estimate how fast we're growing -- too fast and we're at risk of overheating, too slowly and we're at risk of recession.Today, we learned that the economy slowed down in the last quarter. It had been growing at an annual rate of 3.7 percent. In the last three months, the economy grew at a rate of 2.4 percent. If you're wondering what that means, really, it means way, way not fast enough to get us out of this mess.
But here's the other thing. The Bureau of Economic Analysis also revises its numbers over time. Along with the most recent GDP figure, the BEA released new numbers for 2007 through the first part of 2010. The blue line in the chart above, from the essential Calculated Risk, shows how bad we thought things were, at first. The red line shows that the recession was actually worse than we thought.
But then you knew that, right? As Ezra Klein writes, "[t]he normal cycle of recovery has broken." This can't be good news for President Obama and the Democrats, and makes it that much more irresponsible for Republicans to block efforts at helping businesses and human beings.
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