Commerce Department Downward Revision on GDP Growth, 2007-2010

David Frum's lost his marbles, IMHO. He's got an essay up at Memeorandum, and Bryan Preston has the response, "No, David Frum, Our ‘Enemies’ Were Not Right." No, Frum's not right, although he's got an interesting link to The Economist, "Flying blind," which discusses the revised GDP numbers on the economy for the third and fourth quarters of 2008:

Output in the third and fourth quarters fell by 3.7% and 8.9%, respectively, not at 0.5% and 3.8% as believed at the time. Employment was also falling much faster than estimated. Some 820,000 jobs were lost in January, rather than the 598,000 then reported. In the three months prior to the passage of stimulus, the economy cut loose 2.2m workers, not 1.8m. In January, total employment was already 1m workers below the level shown in the official data.

Check the link. The gripe is that policymakers had lousy data, and had they known the full collapse of the the economy, they might have done more. The more, of course, would be even more "stimulus." And that's gotta be a joke. The adminstration's 2009 stimulus was nearly $800 billion. And folks think more would help? See Bastiat Institute, "Lots of Waste, Fraud, and Abuse in the Stimulus, Which Will Cost $43 Billion More Than Expected":

Only a small fraction of the stimulus package went to infrastructure spending, and maintenance-of-effort provisions elsewhere in the stimulus package required states to maintain or increase welfare spending, resulting in cash-strapped states cutting back their own spending on useful things like transportation. As a result, Investor’s Business Daily noted, economists “found that despite the influx of all that federal money, highway construction jobs actually plunged by nearly 70,000 between 2008 and 2010.”

The $800 billion stimulus package was purged of most investments in roads and bridges, and filled instead with welfare and social spending, out of political correctness, after feminist leaders complained that building and repairing roads and bridges would put unemployed blue-collar men to work, rather than women. “A recent Associated Press story reports: ‘Stimulus Funds Go to Social Programs Over ‘Shovel-ready’ Projects.’ A team of six AP reporters who have been tracking the funds find that the $300 billion sent to the states is being used mainly for health care, education, unemployment benefits, food stamps, and other social services.” Or, as another AP report put it, “Stimulus Aid Favors Welfare, Not Work, Programs.” Two economics professors recently estimated that the stimulus had actually wiped out 550,000 jobs.

Obama put people on welfare, not to work.

In any case, check that Commerce Department report, "Gross Domestic Product: Second Quarter 2011 (Advance Estimate): Revised Estimates: 2003 through First Quarter 2011." Scroll down for the 2008 revisions and check the tabular data.

RELATED: From Reuters, "U.S. incomes fell sharply in 2009: IRS data." (At Memeorandum.)

EXTRA: At Michelle's, "The Steve Urkel-ization of the economy, redux."