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The government reported today that economic activity “increased” at an annualized rate of 0.2 percent in the first quarter of 2015. At that pace, “increased” is not really the right word. Effectively, the economy stalled. And by the important measure of final sales (growth minus volatile inventories), it contracted.

The tendency will be strong to blame the weather and to focus instead on the expected rebound this quarter and next, as consumers and businesses catch up on spending and investment they put off in the winter.

That explanation has some truth to it. But it is also misleading. Blaming the weather and overhyping the rebound ignores the following evidence from the report that the economy is still badly underperforming:

Everyone was expecting poor economic performance in the first quarter due to the bad winter. No one was expecting it to be so very poor.

Weather-related problems were not the biggest source of weakness in the report. The weather subtracted about one percentage point from first-quarter growth by denting construction, public spending and car sales. To compare, the trade deficit subtracted 1.25 percentage points from growth, due mainly to falling exports in the face of a strong dollar and global economic weakness. Winter always ends, more or less on schedule. No one knows how long the trade-related drag will last, or how bad it will get.

The report suggests an underlying annual rate of growth of 2 percent to 2.5 percent, the same as in the past several years. At that pace, the economy is not strong enough to repair the damage from the downturn or deliver broad prosperity. Rather, it is a pace consistent with widening inequality, in which the benefits of growth, such as it is, flow mostly to the top of the income and wealth ladder.

Properly understood, the report is saying that active measures are still needed to boost jobs, incomes and consumer demand. Federal Reserve officials should obviously put off raising interest rates until signs of clear and sustained growth emerge.

It is also obvious — to everyone except a majority of lawmakers — that Congress should provide fiscal support. But congressional Republicans can’t bring themselves to do anything that might help the economy, either because they prefer the status quo or because they fear that improvement might reflect favorably on President Obama. They are having trouble even rolling back the draconian spending constraints they allowed into the budget for self-serving political purposes in 2013. Those constraints never did and still don’t have anything to do with economic reality, and no longer serve any political purpose other than assuaging the Republicans’ far right wing — and yet they endure.

Given that dynamic, one can only marvel that the economy has been as resilient as it has been. But why test its limits?