Christina Romer, chair of the White House Council of Economic Advisers, said on C-SPAN that she expected the U.S. gross domestic product to begin growing in the fourth quarter of this year.
Obama’s budget presumes the economy will shrink by 1.2 percent this year. In the first quarter of this year, the economy shrank at a 6.1 percent annual rate, and Romer suggests that for this quarter and the next it will be more shrinkage or almost negligible growth. Somehow, it seems tough to imagine the national GDP loss at only 1.2 percent.
Romer still thinks that growth will be at 3 percent next year, though.
Romer also said that employment will not improve until 2010, which raises the question of why we spent that $787 billion on the stimulus.