30 Apr 20157 The Washington Post plays a sad trombone over the demise of the latest phony “Obama Recovery” narrative:
The gross domestic product grew between January and March at an annualized rate of 0.2 percent, the U.S. Commerce Department said, adding to the picture of an economy braking sharply after accelerating for much of last year. The pace fell well shy of the 1 percent mark anticipated by analysts and marked the weakest quarter in a year.If you guessed that Obama apologists would try to blame all this on the weather, give yourself a fool’s-gold star:
The economy had expanded at a rate of 2.2 percent in the final three months of 2014 and at a rate of 2.4 percent for the year.
Economists, employers and policymakers now face the challenge of determining whether the slowdown is temporary — stemming mostly from an unusually snowy winter in the Northeast — or a sign of broader problems.Snowy winters in the Northeast? Well, that’s never happened before. It seems like only yesterday that Obama was trying to convince us the climate was getting warmer. Actually, it was about three weeks ago. He even tried to blame global warming for his daughters’ asthma attacks. His faithful drones will now tell us an unexpectedly cold winter gave his “recovery” the flu.
Too hot, too cold, too many rich people, not enough government spending… the temperature for the “Obama recovery” will never be just right. We’ve been hearing this ridiculous garbage about cold winters freezing the engines of the mighty Obama growth engine every year for the past six years. The hard, cold truth is that we’ve never had sustained growth under this President’s policies that could do anything more than slow the bleeding in the American workforce. Everything he does, from ObamaCare to his amnesty orders for illegal aliens, is a job-killer. It’s a tribute to the underlying strength of the American economy that we’re not in even worse shape.
Not that politicians have any shame about such things, but the touchdown shuffle Democrats and their media allies were dancing during one utterly anomalous quarter of solid growth look ridiculous today. None of the factors contributing to that good quarter were particularly healthy, or sustainable. One of those factors was unnaturally high consumer confidence, goosed by a wave of media coverage about the supposed arrival of the “recovery” — years behind schedule and trillions of dollars over cost, but worth the wait! The phony enthusiasm didn’t last very long, did it?
Hopefully the current GDP flatline won’t last or degrade into an outright contraction or recession. We’ve dodged quite a few world-event bullets that could have triggered another recession. We’ll most likely return to the growth-equals-inflation equilibrium we’ve been slogging through for the past few years… achieved at a staggering cost in deficit spending. Spending a few trillion dollars you don’t have to artificially stimulate a boom is arguably unwise. Spending it for 2 percent growth is folly, bordering on fiscal suicide.
Meanwhile, even as Obama’s bummer economy increases the “income inequality” gap between hard-working people and oligarchs who donate lots of money to Democrats, the Left is still squealing about how they can fix the income gap if we just give them control over more of the private sector. The opposite is true; economic liberty is the one and only sustainable answer to “inequality.” America will start getting richer the moment we embrace that truth, and consider everyone who doesn’t unfit to hold public office, right down to the municipal level.
You might have noticed that the degree of failure in local governments is directly proportional to the level of Democrat political control, stretching across generations. Have you enjoyed watching the latest grim demonstration of that causal relationship in Baltimore?
Republicans have to be more than just the less-awful alternative. (But seriously, urban voters — shake up your moribund, corrupt local power structure by throwing Democrats out on their posteriors, en masse, and you won’t believe how much better things get. The new guys and gals will work much harder than the Jurassic left-wing machine politicians who run the show now, they won’t have as many payola connections, they’ll be really nervous about losing office in the next election, and your old bosses in the Democrat Party won’t take you for granted anymore. Win, win, win, win!)
To be perfectly clear, no Republican has a magic formula for engineering “fair” prosperity. Neither does any single magnate in the private sector, which is something you should bear in mind when the next liberal-approved “socially conscious” billionaire unspools his plans for Utopia. Fairness is something we all find together, and prosperity is something we all build together. Our riotous, uncoordinated, combined genius far surpasses the agenda of any politician or bureaucrat. Left to our own devices, with free commerce protected impartially by a light and clear burden of law, we find the answers to questions politicians don’t even know how to ask.
Not many of them are humble enough to admit that. They don’t have any incentive to admit it. They derive power by promising to overrule reality by decree. Reality has an unbroken string of total knock-out victories over politics, but politicians are constantly promising us the next big title bout.
What should our gross domestic product and unemployment rate be right now? I don’t know, and neither does anyone else. I know what we’ve got now is far, far weaker than America’s demonstrated history. Every apologist for statism has a hundred carefully-rehearsed reasons for why all historical comparisons with Obama’s limp economy are invalid. The one indisputable truth is that we were more free when we did better.
Let’s try that again, and see what happens. Let’s rattle some cages, pull the bony hands of bankrupt Big Government off the national steering wheel, and see where we can go. The control freaks had their chance — far more of a chance than we should ever have given them — and they sold us stagnation at premium prices.
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