Housing sales fell 27% last month, the biggest drop in 15 years. The official unemployment rate is 9.5% (the real unemployment rate is over 16%, and may be much higher), and weekly unemployment claims rose to their highest level since last november. This year's federal deficit is expected to be $1.3 trillion, the second trillion+ dollar deficit in a row. The country is over $13.2 trillion in debt, the largest dollar debt in American history by far, and it is growing by leaps and bounds. The CBO calculated that President Obama's budgets will add $9.5 trillion to the debt over a decade, over twice as much as any previous admiistration. Most of the states are broke. We are drowning future generations in staggering debt, and we still have $55 trillion in unfunded future entitlement liabilities to deal with, plus ObamaCare looming on the horizon to drastically increase Medicaid spending. The Democrats are looking to impose the largest tax increase in history at the end of the year, during a very weak economy, the weakest in nearly 30 years. Then Obama wants to impose Cap-And-Trade to drive up everyone's energy bills, to "skyrocket" the price of electricity, as Obama said himself. It's almost as if he intends to ruin us. The Democrats are throwing one overhand right after another into the face of our economic futures.
Everybody agrees Obama's stimulus plan didn't have it's intended effect. The White House claimed the stimulus would keep unemployment below 8%, and the Gaffemaster General, VP Joe Biden, said in this "recovery summer," we'd be adding 500,000 jobs per month by now. Clearly, the stimulus didn't come close to those numbers, but borrowing $800 billion to throw around did have some effect. Nobody could spend that much stimulus money with NO result, not even Obama and the Dumbocrats. The problem is, almost all of the stimulus spending only has a temporary effect. When the artificial borrowed stimulus bump runs out at the end of the year, we'll face our ACTUAL economic state (and we'll be another trillion deeper in debt to boot). With economists forecasting flat growth or even a double dip recession THIS year, what will happen when the stimulus funds run out ? Some even think we're in a depression, and point out some comparisons between the Great Depression and now. Not surprisingly, investors are growing wary of the stock market.
The government is running out of avoidance tricks. We can't put interest rates much lower, we can't keep borrowing money to artificially prop us up, and the fed can't print more money to escape reality.
Recovery summer has become recovery bummer, and recovery future is looking more like future shock, when the irresponsibility of these insane fiscal policies (which are actually a lack of fiscal policy) will have to be faced. As they say, "you can run, but you can't hide." We can't hide from our fiscal sins forever. We can only run temporarily, as Obama is doing now. Soon, we'll be out of breath from running, and big bad Mr. Reality will catch up to us. That will be the moment the full weight of our fiscal folly descends down upon us.
All this news led Gaffy Biden to say yesterday,, "no doubt we're heading in the right direction."
Really, Joe ? Then just what in the hell would be the wrong direction ? Mass suicide via poisoned Kool-Aid, or what ? Gaffy must come from the Jim Jones school of economics. Jones wanted to create a socialist paradise on earth too. It didn't work out quite as planned.
Not that I'm pessimistic or anything. I do have a solution – counterfeiting. Print your own money. That will work, and if you get busted, to paraphrase the great economist Thomas Sowell, just tell the feds you weren't counterfeiting, you were engaging in monetary policy. That's what the Federal Reserve calls it when they print money backed by nothing.
Alternately, we could get Congress to start behaving responsibly, but what are the chances of that ?
