A Census Bureau report released on Tuesday reveals that the typical American family now earns less than it did in 1989. In 1989, median household income was $51,681 (in current dollars). In 2012, median household income was $51,017.
Poverty levels in 2012 also climbed to 46.5 million Americans–15% of the country–from 46.2 million in 2011. As Washington Post economics writer Neil Irwin put it, “This isn’t a lost decade for economic gains for Americans. It is a lost generation.”
That’s right. This is the direction our Dear Leader is taking us. He has prosperity stuck in reverse and is determined to stay the course.
The last Recession ended in mid-2009, but we are still waiting for the recovery that typically follows the end of a recession.
2) The unemployment rate dropped for the worst reason.Unemployment dropped to 7.3 percent in August. Huzzah? Sorry, but no.
There are two reasons the unemployment rate dropped. One is that people get jobs. Huzzah! The other is that people stop looking for jobs, and so they’re no longer counted as technically unemployed. That’s what happened here. The number show 312,000 people dropping out of the labor force. That’ll be revised, but if the truth is anywhere close, it’s horrible.
What Ezra Klein, the author of the article, doesn’t mention, is that this is the norm for the so-called “Obama recovery.” Every time our Dear Leader pivots to place his “laser like” focus on the economy, less Americans have jobs.
Either Barack Obama really isn’t that interested in creating a regulatory environment conductive to economic growth or he is massively incompetent and utterly unqualified for the office he currently holds.
What isn’t “phony” about the Obama economy is “Slow GDP growth, lagging job creation, constricted free markets, ballooning deficits and debt, growing and counterproductive regulation, crippling taxation, and the penalization of small business…”
Forbes reports that the German Green Energy Bluster Running Out Of Wind. It seems that unreliable wind produced energy can’t compete without massive government subsidies. Combine that with their policy of shutting down carbon neutral nuclear power plants that deliver steady energy at a lower cost than the very expensive wind turbines, and you have rapidly rising energy costs and cold German winter on the way.
No surprise here, but Hillary Rodham Clinton is throwing Tony Weiner under the bus for his sex scandal. Mentioning her husband’s sex scandals would be in bad taste, so ya, he had a lot of them. HRC responded to those by attacking the women who dared bring up her husband’s sexual harassment. Yup, if it wasn’t for double standards, democrats would have no standards.
The brand just isn’t worth what it used to be. Could it be that alternative media has allowed sophisticated news readers a wider range than the what the narrow far left filter of the Boston Globe gave them.
“A liberal would star at you slack-jawed if you explained that the federal government, via Fannie Mae, Freddy Mac, and the Department of Housing and Urban Development, forced politically correct lending policies on the banks — policies that were attacked by Republicans but ferociously defended by Democrats–and that banks’ suicidal loans were then bundled into mortgage-backed securities and dispersed throughout the entire financial system, which poisoned the economy, bringing down powerful institutions, such as Lehman Brothers, and destroying innumerable families’ financial portfolios.”
As the nice man from Cold Fury puts it, “To achieve this level of devastation, you usually have to be invaded by a foreign power.” Hmmm…given how Obama Cultists feel about the Constitution, he may be on to something here.
Here are a few more facts about the economy that Barry & his cultists don’t want you thinking about: The current US debt is %16.87 Trillion. That works out to $148,026 per tax payer. Taxes have increased $122.8 Billion in 2013 alone. The current budget deficit is $818.5 Billion. The labor force has 10 million less eligible workers than it did right before Barry started his “Occupy the White House” golf tour in 2009. So when an leftist tries to tell you about Obama’s “job creation” record, it’s a lie. The US is in the hole for 10 million jobs under his watch. Don’t expect much improvement either. You may have missed this if you’ve been feeding at the MSM/DNC trough: Obamacare to destroy up to 1 million low-wage jobs and completely bankrupt Medicaid.
Let’s not forget some other items our Dear Leader is desperate to sweep under the rug, including gathering of phone records of the AP (part of his “most transparent administration evah!” continuing war against Whistle Blowers and Inspector Generals), and Eric Holder’s so-called “Justice Department” which won’t prosecute an open and shut case regarding the Black Panthers.
Remember, this is a short list. There are more Obama Scandals that they want to distract you from by waving the race card.
“Tainting the tea party movement with the charge of racism is proving to be an effective strategy for Democrats. There is no evidence that tea party adherents are any more racist than other Republicans, and indeed many other Americans. But getting them to spend their time purging their ranks and having candidates distance themselves should help Democrats win in November. Having one’s opponent rebut charges of racism is far better than discussing joblessness.”
– Mary Frances Berry, former Chairwoman, US Commission on Civil Rights. Clearly she has a basic misunderstanding of the actual meaning of Civil Rights. Given that she was appointed by that idiot James Earl Carter III, this is hardly surprising. Note that she freely admits there is no factual basis for her accusation of racism. It is merely a tactic of the radical left to avoid discussion on their own failures.
“Put down how much you earn, put down a deduction for charitable contributions, home mortgage and how much you owe. It ought to be a simple one-page postcard, and take the agents, the bureaucracy out of Washington and limit the power of government.”
One of the reasons there are so many schools of Keynesian economics is none of them actually work in the real world. It only works in the fantasy world of academia. No wonder leftists flock to it.
When the passage of the Obama “stimulus” package coincided with the economy falling off a cliff, the Keynesians said, “Oh wow, good thing we passed that! The economy is even worse than we realized!”
When the implementation of “austerity” coincided with an economy improving according to the standard metrics, the Keynesians said, “Phew! We got lucky! The economy was doing a lot better than we realized.”
As it has been pointed out here previously, by our Dear Leader‘s own metrics, the US economy is in worse shape than if the federal government had done nothing, make his economic policy a miserable failure.
The GDP growth rate is out for Q1 2013, and at 2.5%, it is a nice improvement over Q4 2012’s 0.4% rate, which was revised up from the original estimate of -0.1%. It’s also lower than the 3% growth the Keynesian economists the Obama regime is strangely still paying attention to, predicted.
A full percentage point of that 2.5% growth was a one time effect of the farming industry recovering from a drought. So the real growth rate was an anemic 1.5%
Household incomes also dropped at a 5.3 percent rate in the first quarter of 2013, and the saving rate – the percentage of disposable income households are socking away – fell to 2.6 percent, the lowest since the fourth quarter of 2007.
Neither of those last two items are a good sign for increases in consumer spending, which is going to get worse, as federal taxes go up, as well as local taxes. The tax burden will be worse in the so-called “Blue” states as their expensive social programs continue to overwhelm their budgets, and their revenue generating working classes flee for states with less oppressive taxes on anyone moderately successful.
The only bright point was that the official government inflation rate was only 0.9%. That is good for tax paying consumers, but is another missed milestone of the Obama Economic Team. They want at least 2%.