If President Obama is warning of a potential economic Doomsday following a quarterly GDP declined of 3.5 percent, what would he have said were he president in the first quarter of 1958, when GDP declined by three times that much?
After the 10.4 percent GDP drop of early 1958, of course, Americans started growing their economy again. GDP expanded by 2.4 percent in the second quarter of 1958, 9.6 percent in the third and 9.5 percent in the fourth. In the first quarter of 1959, it grew 7.9 percent, and in the second quarter it leapt 10.9 percent.
Similar cycles happened in the mid-1970s, and in the early 1980s -- with the economy contracting more than it did in 2008, then coming back with robust growth.
In the third and fourth quarter of 1974 and the first quarter of 1975, GDP declined by 3.8 percent, 1.6 percent and 4.7 percent. In the next four quarters, it grew by 3 percent, 6.9 percent, 5.4 percent and 9.3 percent.
In the fourth quarter of 1981 and first quarter of 1982, GDP declined by 4.9 percent and 6.4 percent. In second quarter of 1982, it grew by 2.2 percent, but then the economy hiccupped with a 1.5 percent decline in the third quarter.
But it should be no surprise what happened next: Over the subsequent three quarters, GDP grew 0.4 percent, 5 percent and 9.3 percent -- and it kept growing all the way through the second quarter of 1990.
It is a historical fact that America's free market economy goes through cycles of growth and contraction that run on a consistently long-term upward track.
Jennifer Loven, White House correspondent for The Associated Press, pointed this out in the first question of Monday's press conference.
"Can you talk about what you know or what you're hearing that would lead you to say that our recession might be permanent, when others in our history have not?" said Loven. "And do you think that you risk losing some credibility or even talking down the economy by using dire language like that?"
In fact, talking down the economy serves Obama's purposes. It helps sell his agenda for massively increasing government.
And it could be a self-fulfilling prophecy: America's economy has grown in the past because the American people have not been overburdened by government. Obama could cause irreversible decline by creating an unsustainable government.