My Father was a Certified Public Accountant and so is my older brother, now comfortably retired in Florida. I tell you this because I would be hard-pressed to balance my checkbook.
Even so, you do not have to be smart with numbers to know that the real state of the U.S. economy is pathetic these days. You can thank Barack Obama for that because, dear reader, he is utterly clueless regarding America’s economy; how it works, and what it needs to work.
Peter Ferrara, a Senior Fellow at The Heartland Institute specializing on entitlement and budget policy and a contributor to Forbes magazine, is one of the people to whom I go to understand the economy.
In a May 2 edition, in an article titled “What Obama’s Growth Recession Is Stealing From Your Wallet”, Ferrara wrote “Restoring that booming economic growth and prosperity (of past decades) is the core of solving all of our nation’s problems, not income or wealth redistribution, or addressing ‘inequality.’ But President Obama is not on the path of restoration. The latest report on real GDP growth estimates this year’s first quarter at a pitiful 0.01%. This is in the 6th year of Obama’s Presidency.”
The Heritage Foundation’s chief economist, Stephen Moore, writing on May 1st in the National Review, asked, “What happens to an economy when you do just about everything wrong?” Here’s his list:
Say you spend $830 billion on a stimulus stuffed with make-work government-jobs programs and programs to pay people to buy new cars,
you borrow $6 trillion,
you launch a government-run healthcare system that incentivizes businesses not to hire more workers,
you raise tax rates on the businesses that hire workers and on the investors that invest in the businesses that hire workers,
you print $3 trillion of paper money,
you shut down an entire industry (coal), and try to regulate and restrain the one industry that actually is booming (oil and gas).