In a Wednesday report on the Congressional Budget Office's downward revision of this year's predicted gross domestic product growth to a dismal 1.5 percent, the Associated Press's Andrew Taylor acted as if the Obama administration's prediction of 2.6 percent still has a realistic chance of occurring.
While one never wants to absolutely say never, the administration's higher prediction would require annualized growth to come in at roughly 4.3 percent during the second half of this year — something virtually no one is predicting. It would also rely on the second quarter, initially reported at 4.0 percent in July's first release, not to be revised downward significantly. The government's second iteration of GDP growth will be released at 8:30 this morning. Excerpts from Taylor's report follow the jump.
Note that Taylor failed to tell readers that CBO's prediction, if realized, would cause GDP growth to come in a the lowest level since recession-plagued 2009:
US ECONOMY FORECAST TO GROW BY 1.5 PERCENT IN 2014
The Congressional Budget Office on Wednesday forecast that the U.S. economy will grow by just 1.5 percent in 2014, undermined by a poor performance during the first three months of the year.
The new assessment was considerably more pessimistic than the Obama administration's, which predicted last month that the economy would expand by 2.6 percent this year even though it contracted by an annual rate of 2.1 percent in the first quarter.
The economy did grow by 0.9 percent during the first half of 2014.
Looking ahead, the CBO said it expected the economy to grow by 3.4 percent over 2015 and 2016, and predicted that the unemployment rate would remain below 6 percent into the future.
Taylor's final sentence is extremely weak. For the unemployment rate to "remain" below 6 percent, it would first have to get to 6 percent, which hasn't yet happened since the official end of the recession in June 2009.
Taylor, whose Twitter page says he "covers a dysfunctional Congress," should leave the job of distorted reporting on the economy to the AP's business and economics writers, who at least wouldn't have blown a simple fact on the unemployment rate.
Cross-posted at BizzyBlog.com.
