Tuesday, July 16, 2013

"We're Recovering"

It is now mid-July of 2013, more than 4 1/2 years since the financial collapse and still we hear the phrase: "we're recovering."  How long are we going to hear that?

Below 2 percent economic growth and almost 8 percent unemployment means that the US economy is paralyzed.  The Obama Administration seems to have thrown in the towel on the subject of growing the economy.  Right they should!  The Administration policies, piled on top of the policy history of the past fifty years, virtually guarantee that the vibrant economy of the Old USA is not in our future.

There are bright spots -- autos, housing, energy -- but there are always bright spots.  What is missing is small business vitality.  That's gone and not coming back until folks figure out how to get around the mass of regulations and taxes that bedevil the American economy.  Other than outsourcing, it is not clear how to avoid the strangling effect of American regulatory policy.  As for employment, hiring anyone seems downright irrational, given current tax and regulatory policies.

The Obama Administration has reduced the expectations of most Americans to the kind of future that Europeans now have -- stagnation, limited opportunity for the young, guarantees for the oldest demographic that are coming apart at the seams, and debts that no one has any intention of honoring.

So the phrase "we're recovering" is getting tiresome.  We're not recovering, we're changing.  The quasi-socialism that has supplanted free enterprise is preventing a serious recovery like the one we had in the 1980s.  The "bad old days" were actually "good old days" as Americans are learning to their dismay.