Second Quarter GDP Revised Way Up

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Here is today’s good economic news:

Real gross domestic product — the output of goods and services produced by labor and property located in the United States — increased at an annual rate of 2.5 percent in the second quarter of 2013….The GDP estimate released today is based on more complete source data than were available for the “advance” estimate issued last month. In the advance estimate, the increase in real GDP was 1.7 percent.

That’s quite a revision. GDP growth was actually half again as large as the BEA originally estimated, which is about as big a relative revision as I can remember. It still doesn’t show the economy roaring ahead or anything, but it certainly shows a good deal more strength than we thought.

And just think: If it weren’t for this year’s round of austerity, growth might have been just a few ticks below 4 percent. That would have been a genuinely positive number. It’s too bad we’ve chosen instead to deliberately sabotage the economy.