Bill Bennett: “yesterday, in the Joint Economic Committee, we heard from the chairman of the President's Council of Economic Advisers.…”

“yesterday, in the Joint Economic Committee, we heard from the chairman of the President's Council of Economic Advisers. As often happens in that committee, there were a number of issues raised. I would like to take the floor simply to clarify where we really are with respect to the economy. There are so many things being said in this election period about the economy that it is always nice to reflect on what the late Senator Moynihan used to say: Everyone is entitled to his own opinion, but not to his own facts. Let's spend a little time talking about the facts and understand where the economy is. With a series of charts, I will try to do it as quickly as I can, with an understanding of where the economy currently is. This first chart demonstrates economic growth as measured by GDP, gross domestic product. The bars on the chart represent quarters. The quarters with positive GDP growth are represented by blue bars. Quarters with declines in GDP are represented by red bars. If you will notice here in the beginning of 2000, the economy started to shrink-- that which we refer to as the recent recession which began in 2000. These are the quarters in which that happened. We got a recovery starting in the fourth quarter of 2001, but as these bars above the zero line demonstrate, the recovery was pretty anemic. Not much happened for a little over a year, as the recovery did not get traction. The recovery took off in the second quarter of 2003.…”