“The summer of recovery is going to be the ‘Mission Accomplished’ banner of this administration,” Jennifer Rubin writes at Commentary.
As the above Michael Rameriez cartoon from February of 2009(!) illustrates, this wasn’t too hard to see coming, based on the administration’s outdated top-down thinking, a Galbraithian mindset much more in-tune with the mid-century Mad Men era than today’s demassified economy. (“It won’t work,” Stacy McCain first warned in December of 2008. A couple of months later, I shot this video. Note the title.)
In her post today, Jennifer spots:
Another dollop of rotten economic news:
The U.S. economy grew more sluggish than initially estimated in the second quarter, and corporate profits nearly dried up, further evidence that the recovery is losing steam.
Gross domestic product, the value of all goods and services produced, rose at an annualized seasonally adjusted rate of 1.6% from April to June, the Commerce Department said Friday. …
Friday’s report also showed that companies barely managed to post profit gains, following several very profitable quarters. After-tax earnings edged up 0.1%, well off the previous quarter’s gain of 11.4%. First-quarter profits were revised down from the initial estimate of a 12.1% increase.
Yet the administration claims its stimulus plan has worked and that the recovery is in full swing. No problem with a massive tax increase — the economy can handle it. No problem with the massive mandates and fees imposed by ObamaCare — it’s going to be good for employers. John Boehner is right about firing the Obama economic team. (Christine Roemer didn’t quit for nothing.) The voters will have to take care of the rest, and I fully expect they will, beginning in November.
Elsewhere at Commentary, James K. Glassman asks, does all this portend, “The Failure of the Liberal Economic Experiment?”
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