look where economic growth is now. it s 1%. we re squaoeng out growth. china had a gdp number last week of 6.% versus under 2% for the u.s. things have gotten better. there is a better sentiment in the air. growth hasn t turned the corner. bill: is it your feeling if you do healthcare and tax reform that both contribute to growth in the american economy? what would that compute to then if we re at 1% now? it would be what the president talked about 4% in the next year or two. you don t get there right away. there is a way to get to better numbers if you take away the taxes that are killing people in obamacare. affordable care act. he told us a week and a half ago he wants to do healthcare first. it is almost a trillion in savings. you use that trillion to pay off tax reform as a way to pay for tax cuts. but look, i think it s very important that the market understands that there is a
and the dismal growth of 1.5% for the past year. growth hasn t risen above 3% for any full year in any year of the obama presidency. let us talk about this with christine romans, chief business correspondent and star of early start. 2 .9% is better than economists expected. it s definitely a big improvement from earlier in the year. let s talk about where we are. 2.9%, double the growth in the beginning part of the year and relief, because a lot of other economic signs have been turning up. what this tells us is after a soft spot, the economy is still continuing to crawl out of the hole that happened seven years ago. it s still moving forward here. we look inside this number, we see consumer spending, we see business investment, not as bad as we expected. we see all kinds of cylinders of the american economy moving forward. donald trump has said 4% is the number. 4% is the number he could get. 4% is a number we have not seen since 1998 when bill clinton was the president.
position and take into account all of the subtleties and the other candidates are disregarding that. i think austin is on to something. if this gets too wonky and they go into the weeds, they are going to lose. say they have command without going into all of the details. the safe spot for all of these guys is when they are not sure what to say, they are going to say, we re not going to be like barack obama and that s what hillary clinton is going to be. we have sluggish recovery. the biggest thing you ll hear about is the candidate not on the stage and why growth will come from their plans and why growth hasn t come from theirs. all eyes on donald trump and ben carson. thank you both. outfront, next, ben carson is a retired surgeon and he s topping the polls in the republican race.
she worked with clinton at the state department and now calls her a friend. you have to be tough, but you can t be too tough or you are immediately in really unpleasant territory, right? the b word. she can stand up. but if she s too hard there will be a boomer an. cat cole is part of focus brands. you operate in 60 countries around the world. the work is in the midst of a minimum wage fight. the whole discussion around minimum wage, private sec sector, enabling growth hasn t gotten the energy i would have loved to have seen. those there was excitement there was a feeling among some that something was lacking. the debate exposed the men s weaknesses even more. and it didn t really make me feel good about the democratic
country? i think the reason we re here today is because there s been no action at the federal level. by the way, most recently there s been a proposal to raise the federal minimum wage to $12 an hour. these proposals keep coming up congress is so gridlocked they re not moving at all. we have an economic recovery in its sixth year, and yet there are many notice low wage sector who have been left behind. if you ask them how the recovery is doing, some are going to scratch their head and say, it doesn t look like much of a recovery to me. interestingly local actors, state governments, but in this case a labor board have been responding to their claims which i think are accurate claims that this growth hasn t reached them, and have moved to increase their pay, it s part of a longer term movement where we see now something like 29 states and the district attorney of columbia have minimum wages higher than the federal level. i want to put this full screen up here. and show you some of th