MOTUS A.D.: A shining city on the hill, or the proverbial end of the line? Just asking.

Thursday, June 26, 2014

A shining city on the hill, or the proverbial end of the line? Just asking.

It’s like the The Never Ending Story meets the Bad News Bears: the VA implosion, the implosion of Iraq, the implosion at the border, the implosion of IRS computer hard drives (along with the EPA’s) and now, the implosion of the economy. And that’s just in the past month!

…a giant sucking sound

Imagine how you’d feel if you were president and had to find out about all of this when you tuned into the evening news. Without so much as a heads up before another disaster strikes it’s hard to “frame the discussion” properly. Which is to say, it’s hard to effectively shift the blame away from yourself and back onto your predecessor (as an aside: read about how Bush is now officially the longest serving U.S. President in history, edging FDR out by 2 full terms).

Butt with things going from bad to worse in Iraq, even Big Guy would rather focus on the lame economy:

Remember when in January 2014, Q1 GDP was expected to rise 2.6%? Well, here comes the final Q1 GDP revision and it's a doozy: at -2.9%, far below the -1.8% expected and well below the -1.0% second revision, it is an absolute disaster, and is the worst print since Q1 2009.

I’m not sure how anyone could be surprised that the country experienced negative growth (i.e. “honey, I’ve shrunk the economy!”) in the first quarter.

I mean, what else can you expect when 93 million Americans have dropped out of the workforce resulting in the lowest labor participation rate since Jimmy Carter, another 11 million have somehow joined the ranks of the sick, lame and lazy, and 46 million Americans are on food stamps.

Wow! If this is a recovery, Detroit is a boom town.