Today’s data release from the Bureau of Economic Analysis reports that GDP grew at a 2.6 percent annualized rate in the last three months of 2014. For the year, quarterly growth rates averaged 2.5 percent, but the last three quarters of the year saw growth run at just over 4 percent.  A key reason for the good economic performance in the last three quarters of 2014 was that government spending cuts stopped dragging on growth as much as they did in 2013 – an outcome of the fiscal deal that cancelled most of the “sequester” cuts for 2014. We should heed this lesson and do away with the damaging fiscal drag from sequester going forward as well.