Sunday, February 14, 2016

THE OBAMA ECONOMY AND THE ELECTION

Well, well, the stock market has, of a sudden, caught up with the Obama economy. The spectacle is not pretty. In January the market dropped like a stone. The Dow Jones Industrial Average lost 8.1 percent. Friday the Nasdaq shed 3.25 percent points upon hearing the news that payroll additions grew by only 151,000 jobs. That was well behind the monthly average of last year, another year of Obama recovery. That is to say, it was another year of meager growth. In the last quarter of 2015 the economy grew at less than 1 percent. If this is a recovery, it is coming very close to looking like a prolonged recession.

Yet out on the campaign trail the Democratic candidates (there are two) led by a self-proclaimed socialist, Bernie Sanders, and apparently a socialist wannabe, Hillary Clinton, are still promising to burden us with more crackpot plans and more extravagant spending unto Utopia. The federal debt has increased by almost $8 trillion since Obama came into office and now stands at an untenable $19 trillion. Still the campaigning Democrats are promising ever more healthcare, free college education (including presumably rape counseling and anger management courses), plus “equal pay” for “equal work,” which means more government regulation for a problem that many economists (as opposed to sociologists and feminists) say is no problem at all.

Meanwhile Hillary is simultaneously saying she is more progressive than Bernie and more electable because she is…she is what? More likable? More honest? More trustworthy? More youthful and more feminine? Hillary’s pitch makes no sense. She will not come out and say she is not as leftwing as Bernie because that would offend the growing leftwing of her party. So she is yelling that she is more leftwing than the socialist Bernie, while hoping that moderates stick with her—though there are few moderates remaining in the party. I shall say it again: this election is going to be a bloodbath for the Democrats.

http://spectator.org/articles/65430/obama-economy-and-election

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