Topic: Decline of the West
Really, though, how is the economy doing? After all, things aren’t as bead as they were when Obama took the oath. So maybe Debbie Wasserman Schultz had a point when she claimed that the Prez and his team have turned things around.
It’s true that according to the textbook definitions of “recession” and “recovery,” the former has ended and the latter is underway. But if you examine the actual economic climate, as Irwin M. Stulzer did in this article for the Weekly Standard, the scenario doesn’t seem quite as rosy as Debbie and Barry would have us believe:
The key here is uncertainty. Not uncertainty as to whether short skirts will sell better than long skirts, or muted colors will prove to be the fashion choice for the autumn, or even whether interest rates will rise. That’s the sort of uncertainty businessmen have lived with ever since there were markets, and for which they get the big bucks to predict accurately. It is political uncertainty.
Talk to any banker and, if candid, he will tell you he can live with almost any regulation that comes out of Washington. He will either figure a way around it, or learn to live with it, perhaps passing on its cost to consumers. But when somewhere out of sight hundreds of regulators are working on thousands of pages of regulations to implement the Dodd-Frank law, he takes fright. Not knowing what is coming down the road, uncertain whether the president will decide once again that he needs bankers to serve as piñatas to provide impetus to his flagging reelection campaign, he becomes gloomy. That affects not only how investment bankers run their own businesses, but how they advise clients who are sitting on $2 trillion of excess cash, earning almost nothing, and too uncertain to invest it in new plant and jobs.
Elsewhere in his article, Stulzer discusses the ill effects of Obamacare, which by making labor costs less predictable is having an adverse effect on job growth. Bottom line: The policies of the Obama Administration are throttling the recovery by preventing the strong GNP growth and job creation that would otherwise have occurred. The Community Organizer-in-Chief seems to have flunked Econ 101.