I haven’t been paying a lot of attention to quarterly GDP numbers. For one thing, they do tend to bounce around a lot; for another, claims that a good number in a particular quarter somehow validates the Trumpian claim to be able to achieve high growth for a decade are almost too stupid to argue with.

But there are a couple of points I think are worth making about growth over the past year.

First, as Jason Furman notes, a good part of the 2.5% growth seems to be cyclical – the result of the economy moving closer to full employment, not a pickup in the underlying growth rate of potential output, which looks more like 1% than the 3% Trump et al need to make their numbers work.