I’ve made it brutally clear that I believe that the recovery is a lie. A smaller percentage of our population is at work now than 6 months ago, and yet the government reports that the unemployment rate is down. Food stamps are exploding, manufacturing is still 3 million jobs short of 2007 levels, and our economy just recently stopped growing — our GDP growth in March was roughly what inflation was.
The government has been absolutely and unavoidably failing over the last four years. It’s been almost half of a decade since the financial crisis became obvious to everyone on mainstreet, and our government has failed to fix it — even though they claimed they would.
Instead of fixing the fundamental flaws that triggered the crisis, they’ve focused on raising debt and printing money, with a healthy dose of encouraging people to randomly hate the rich. It hasn’t worked.
Right now, Obama is trying to pitch everything as though he’s somehow successfully known exactly what it would take, that the unemployment is slowly decreasing (it’s not) according to plan.
But it’s not remotely true — he was cocky when he first got into the White House. He had never done anything connected with a business in his life, and as a small business owner, let me tell you that means he shouldn’t have had access to the White House garage, much less the Oval Office.
In 2009, brand-new president Barack Obama arrogantly explained:
“If I don’t have this done in three years, then there’s going to be a one-term proposition.”
Hopefully, future generations will remember those words as the famous slogan of a one-term proposition.
What This Means for Us
This tone and these claims mean that they were convinced their economic theories were correct. They were convinced that they could manipulate the money supply, print the cash and give it to their smarter-than-normal-people friends, and fix the economy.
They believed, incredibly enough, that the problem with Bush was that he supported too much of a free market. They believed that they could plan the economy in a way that could do what trillions of people couldn’t do individually. The arrogance was astounding.
Here are unavoidable facts:
- No Growth. The GDP essentially stopped growing in March, after accounting for inflation. If accounting for real inflation, you can see the problem — our real economy is drastically shrinking, and is beating eaten alive by the parasitic government economy.
- No Jobs. Fewer people are working now than a year ago. They’ve cooked the data to make this hard to see. But it’s in there — just go to the BLS.gov website and look at their labor market participation rate. It’s incredible.
- No Options. We’re running out of options. The Fed has interest rates at 0%, and loans are still incredibly difficult to acquire. Money is everywhere, but not being spent, because printing money via the Fed doesn’t spur on real spending. It’s a broken system — it’s a liquidity trap.
Bernanke has even run out of ways to “inflate” the economy in the “right” way. His money is sitting in vaults or pouring into commodities — little of it is moving through the economy, but a lot of it is pulling money away from the middle class toward the politically connected.
If it wasn’t for food stamps, people would literally be starving in the streets by now, and violent riots would have already taken hold of the United States. In good time, I suppose.
The charts that show an increase in jobs are lies — especially when we remember that a debt-based, government job doesn’t count economically anymore than reinstating the draft would be considered an economic miracle. It just messes with reported employment — not actual employment.
What Must We Do?
After almost half of a decade of Keynesian promises of economic prosperity we see:
a) There’s almost no GDP growth.
b) Fewer people are working than last year.
c) “Early” retirements are occurring.
d) Food stamps are exploding.
e) Debt is skyrocketing.
f) Debt-to-GDP is almost beyond reform.
The policies of Bush and Obama have failed us. They have not worked. They have focused on printing money and issuing bonds. They have focused not on universal tax cuts, but on deficits being created by dumping money on their friends.
They have failed, they have failed, they have failed. This is not purely an intellectual topic for people who enjoy debate and discussion. This is about millions of people.
Keynes is dead, and so are his theories. If we are to have prosperity, it will not be with the government, but in spite of it. It will not be with paper currency, or the broken-window fallacy. If we’re to have a recovery that is sustainable, it must be based on sound economics, sound money, and stable, extremely low taxation.
Bring back gold, end the Fed, cut taxes, cut regulations, and let the people get back to living their lives without politicians and thieves robbing them blind.
Here’s to the Austrian school.
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