US Economic Growth Basically Stopped in 2014's First Quarter

“Anemic” would be an improvement.

The American economy slammed on the brakes in the beginning of 2014, as weaker exports and lower spending by businesses essentially brought growth to a standstill.

At 0.1 percent, the pace of expansion in January, February and March was the slowest since late 2012, and revealed another one of the periodic pauses in the growth that has characterized the slow recovery of the last five years.

Many experts had predicted a slowing in the first quarter of 2014, especially in the wake of more robust growth in the second half of 2013 and very cold weather in January and February, but the figures released by the Commerce Department on Wednesday morning were still drastically below the 1.2 percent rate of expansion that Wall Street had been expecting.

RNC Chairman Reince Preibus pounced in a statement released to the media.

“These sobering economic numbers are the result of President Obama and a Democrat Party more interested in implementing ObamaCare, which is killing jobs and hurting businesses than on policies that will grow the economy.  With President Obama and Senate Democrats now focused on a minimum wage increase – which will kill 500,000 jobs – it’s time we shift our focus back to the Republican pro-growth, pro-jobs agenda such as approving the Keystone Pipeline that will get our economy growing again.”

This has been the Obama Democrats’ MO all along — place their own political needs ahead of the nation’s needs, on the economy, foreign policy, everything. In the case of the Keystone, Obama has been bought by billionaire environmentalist Tom Steyer into opposing a pipeline that would actually make transporting oil safer while creating jobs.

The media is doing its part, accepting and propagating the spin that Old Man Winter, not Obamacare or the EPA’s regulations or any action taken by the Democrats in Washington, are to blame.

Which is curious, if you stop and think about it all for a second. We’re asked to believe that our actions are literally changing the planet’s climate, and asked to believe at the same time that deliberate political actions designed to impact the economy aren’t changing the nation’s economic climate.