Expect the political rhetoric and unsupportable statements to increase as we continue in this USA Presidential election cycle. The USA economy sucks (my technical word), and every Presidential candidate has the solution.

But here is the problem – economics has a lot of theories but is void of real scientific proof any theory will work in a given situation. As a consumption based economy – the primary measure of economic health is consumer spending which contributed (weakly) to the very weak USA expansion cycle. The Cleveland Fed summed up the situation best.

Policymakers are concerned that consumption has not fully recovered this long after the Great Recession. Demyanyk et al. (2015) contribute to a body of literature that tries to uncover the determinants of consumption growth.

During the 2000s, the impact of some factors like income growth and unemployment was fairly stable over time, but the impact of other factors was quite heterogeneous across periods. This poses a unique challenge for economic policymakers. If, for instance, house price appreciation was an important determinant of consumption growth throughout, policymakers could stabilize the economy with policies aimed at supporting house prices. However, as Demyanyk et al. (2015) found, the statistical relation between house-price appreciation and consumption growth is unstable, sometimes important, other times not. This result implies that economic policy needs to rely on economic models which depart from more fundamental determinants of consumer behavior. Pinning those down is still a major challenge for economic research.

Politically motivated pundits – say Nobel Laureate Paul Krugman – try to point out truth and fiction in political positions.

… But Jeb Bush – who is still attempting to justify his ludicrous claim that he can double our rate of economic growth — says that Americans “need to work longer hours and through their productivity gain more income for their families.” …

… on display in Hillary Clinton's planned Monday speech on the economy – that workers need more help, in the form of guaranteed health insurance, higher minimum wages, enhanced bargaining power, and more. Republicans, however, believe that American workers just aren't trying hard enough to improve their situation, and that the way to change that is to strip away the safety net while cutting taxes on wealthy “job creators.”