Government-Sponsored Pain

Silverfiddle Rant!

Inflations is not letting up, and we have a global energy crisis.

Frightening economic conditions are crushing ordinary Americans.

All this brought to us by the "leaders" and "experts" who... 

...thought it would be neato to consolidate a majority of the world's critical manufacturing in a communist nation determined to avenge historical humiliations, overpower its main enemy (The United States) and dominate the world.  Yes, educated people saw this even back in the 1980's when Papa Bush was admonishing us to not isolate China.

... doubled down on stupid by panicking in the face of the global covid pandemic.  Leaders and experts fomented hysteria, forcing the shutdown of schools and the main engines of the global economy, despite knowledge that the elderly and those in poor health (unlikely to be in school or the workplace) made up over 90% of deaths.

As if that weren't enough, the geniuses in the bowels of our federal government decided now was a great time to foment a hot war between Ukraine and Russia.  As a result, continued gas flow through the Nordstream pipeline is in doubt, Germany is burning coal again, and Europe is worried about making it through the winter with enough energy to heat homes and power the economy.

Yeah, we need a "Great Reset," but not the kind the rich and powerful have in mind...

Recommended Reading

See President Biden: The Chastisement of the American People by Tammy Swofford (June 3, 2022). 

Just one of the points made in the above essay: 

...Forcing Americans into a fossil fuel crisis with the hope that we will all purchase electric vehicles is akin to a barren forty-five year old couple spending lavishly on a nursery for the newborn that will never arrive. But the fools keep shelling out money to the fertility specialist who promises them a future and gives birth to the wind....

[...]

...“Clean energy” is just the Ponzi scheme that enriches the wealthy and impoverishes the average American. We are indeed, impoverished now – with the fuel crisis. But “clean energy” is just one of the many dark money schemes hoisted upon the American People....

Read the entire essay HERE. Please read thoughtfully. 

Baby Formula Shortage?

Really?

The first photo is from this morning at the Ursula Processing Center at the U.S. border. Shelves and pallets packed with baby formula.

The second is from a shelf right here at home. Formula is scarce.

This is what America last looks like. pic.twitter.com/OO0V99njoy

— Kat Cammack (@Kat_Cammack) May 11, 2022

The top and bottom shelf look like apple juice or applesauce (I could be wrong), but the middle shelf is baby formula.

Empty Shelves?

As I mentioned before, we're experiencing a disruption of supply lines here in Indiana. We're still waiting for delivery of the aforementioned recliner. Warren ordered and paid for that recliner in July!

On our last trip to the grocery store a few days ago, we noticed a few shortages. The one that most impacts me at this point: almost no ginger ale on the shelf. I drink a bit of ginger ale every evening to settle my stomach. Otherwise, there is no shortage personally impacting us.  Yet, anyway.  We did notice that the price of beef is through the roof. But that's another story....

In the Washington, D.C., area, however, shoppers are experiencing at least some significant disruptions in supply lines. See this short video. Five to six months before things get back to normal? Sheesh!

So, are you noticing empty shelves or other related disruption where you are?

Note: Warren and I have been a bit absent from the blogosphere because we both got sick with either a common cold or Omicron.  We're over the worst of it, but the fatigue factor remains major for me.  I'm napping a lot!  Taking down the Christmas tree has to wait.

Disrupted Supply Lines?

A personal story....

So, way back in May, Warren ordered a La-Z-Boy reclining chair and a half so as to accommodate him and his large dog Smokie. The recliner that Warren has now is all broken down. Unbelievably so! And in less than five years!  We aren't bothering moving that pitiful chair from Warren's old house to this house where we are now.  And, fortunately, I saved my parents' full size sofa from all those years ago.  Otherwise, we'd have a real paucity of living-room furniture!

But...

The huge living room in our house needs that recliner so that I have one recliner (a La-Z-Boy lift chair, bought in 2010 for Mr. AOW and still going strong all these years later, mostly because Mr. AOW never got well enough to use it consistently) for me and one for Warren.

Warren is still waiting for the chair he ordered back in July and prepaid at the time of ordering. When he contacted the store a few weeks ago, they shrugged and said, "It won't be ready until February." 

 HUH?

Masking

I can barely tolerate wearing a mask,  I do so only because I must in order to enter any medical facility and any store — and because I'm a senior citizen at significant risk of contracting the China Virus.

When I'm wearing a mask, the seconds and minutes crawl by.  And I do mean crawl!

I recently had a kidney scan lasting almost two hours and was miserable beyond words.  The longer I have the mask on, particularly a medical mask, the more I gasp for air and — Get this!— begin to drool.  I can hardly wait until the time comes that I can sanitize my hands, then can rip off that mask and breathe.

And then came the day that I had to visit an oral surgeon for the extraction of a molar.  I had never before even laid eyes on this doctor of dentistry.  What an eerie experience!  I, of course, had to remove my mask, but the oral surgeon and his assistant were masked.  They were faceless.  They were nearly disembodied voices.  Twilight Zone time!  Remember this episode?

 

Here in this annus horribilis, we are being told that wearing a mask, even a cloth mask, is an important element of an effective method to curb the spread of COVID-19. An effective method now, that is.  At the start of the declaration of this pandemic, we were told that masks did no good and were even dangerous.  A few weeks later, we were told "Mask up!  I protect you, and you protect me."

Then the edicts from governors and mayors began in earnest.

Do masks protect us, really?  Or is something else afoot?

From Masks Are Another Way To Control Society Through Isolation: Mask scolds have been monomaniacal about this virus as if there is no other way to die. What they don’t seem to understand is that this is no way to live (December 2, 2020, emphases mine):

...Suffice it to say that some people are too much in a state of fear and ignorance to see mask mandates as anything but safety measures, but most of us know when we’re being played — and we are indeed being played. We can see it in the experts’ vacillation since day one of the pandemic. 

We began with “15 days to flatten the curve” to no end in sight for lockdowns and masks eight months later. We began with Dr. Anthony Fauci’s claim that “there’s no reason to be walking around with a mask,” but now experts insist that they are “required” to stop the spread. We began with the logical assumption that a vaccine would bring us back to normal, but then we heard from Fauci that a vaccine won’t change anything “for at least a year.”...

"A vaccine won't change anything for at least a year"?  

Huh?  The way that talking heads and politicians of all stripes are pontificating about masks, we are led to believe that COVID-19 vaccines are magic talismans, along the lines of "We're going to wave the magic wand and get back to normal."

Meanwhile, masking has now progressed to lockdowns mandated by state and local governments.  Talk about isolation on steroids!  Sheesh.

Returning now to the above-cited essay, which ends as follows (emphases mine):  

If we wish to remain free, however, we should reject mask-wearing as any kind of normal. We should never get used to seeing a landscape of masked faces at the grocery store, at businesses, and especially out in the open air. Small children in particular should never have to adopt this as normal — because it is confusing and abnormal. It isolates us and erases our unique identities. 

Acquiescence to politicized mask mandates also removes our sense of common humanity. We end up living in a faceless, dehumanized sea of anonymous people, and that is no way to live.

Please read and consider the entire essay HERE.  Worth your time.

What do you believe about masking and lockdowns?

Comment Of The Day

September 16, 2020 comment made by Baysider at GeeeZ on Z's excellent post "WHY TRUMP DOES BETTER… look at the comparisons!": 

...De Blasio says, with all the people leaving NYC, that we need to raise taxes on the rich AND “we have to redistribute income.” How about YOURS, your honor? He just announced he’d furlough his salary, but I suspect it’s a rebound from the terrible optics of “redistributing income.” To quote from his Wikipedia page: he did “a brief stint as a campaign manager for Charles Rangel and Hillary Clinton …[and] started his career as an elected official on the New York City Council. So your career never took you into the real world of working for a living. 

 Plus, he said restaurants would continue to be closed for indoor dining (only very reduced sidewalk dining), because dining out was “an activity for middle- and upper-income New Yorkers.” Really? Are these higher income folks the ones who 1) shop for the menu, 2) deliver food and supplies, 3) cook the food 4) serve the food, 5) bus the dishes, 6) wash the dishes, 7) clean up the restaurant, 8) ferry diners to the restaurant, 9) service the equipment, and 10) grow the food in the first place? CLUELESS!! 

We hear stories of people who stayed not working because the combined state and federal unemployment benefit (of which I received ZERO) was more than their salary. Then I ran into one. My locksmith had to furlough his helper in April. When he could work again and asked him to come back to work, he did not want to – and didn’t. It was because he made a lot more in gov’t $$$....

If you have time, it is worth your time to see why Z stated that Trump does better. Read Z's post HERE.

Quite The Contrast

From Comically Incorrect:

And another from Comically Incorrect:

Meanwhile, the movement to defund the police appears to be gaining momentum.

Are you as fed up as I am with all this fomenting of anarchy?

How much more can our republic withstand?

Consequences

(cross-posted last week to Infidel Bloggers Alliance, where you might find some comments of there of interest)

This matter should concern all of us.  From The Federalist, dated April 23, 2020....

Instead Of ‘Flattening The Curve,’ We Flattened Hospitals, Doctors, And The U.S. Health Care System: Across the country, hospitals shut down 'non-essential' procedures in preparation for a surge of coronavirus patients that never appeared

When the lockdowns began last month, we were told that if we didn’t stay home our hospitals would be overwhelmed with coronavirus patients, intensive care wards would be overrun, there wouldn’t be enough ventilators, and some people would probably die in their homes for lack of care. To maintain capacity in the health-care system, we all had to go on lockdown—not just the big cities, but everywhere.

So we stayed home, businesses closed, and tens of millions of Americans lost their jobs. But with the exception of New York City, the overwhelming surge of coronavirus patients never really appeared—at least not in the predicted numbers, which have been off by hundreds of thousands.

[...]

[H]ospitals and health care systems nationwide have had to furlough or lay off thousands of employees. Why? Because the vast majority of most hospitals’ revenue comes from elective or “non-essential” procedures. We’re not talking about LASIK eye surgery but things like coronary angioplasty and stents, procedures that are necessary but maybe not emergencies—yet. If hospitals can’t perform these procedures because governors have banned them, then they can’t pay their bills, or their employees....

Read the rest HERE.

Additional reading...

1. Young and middle-aged people, barely sick with covid-19, are dying from strokes: Doctors sound alarm about patients in their 30s and 40s left debilitated or dead. Some didn’t even know they were infected

2. Coronavirus: China Continues to Flood the World with Defective Medical Supplies.

"Never Let a Crisis Go To Waste"

Silverfiddle Rant!

Big Government has ordered everyone to stay in their homes and has promulgated a gargantuan $2 trillion emergency spending bill.  These ukases have snapped the frayed ties that had moored us to reality and time-tested principles. We are in dangerous waters, and politicians, tastemakers and thought leaders of all stripes are preaching nostrums that just months ago would have gotten them laughed off the mainstream public stage. Doctrinaire leftists are also roaring back, eager to see if their unbalanced old ideas can gain traction in this new unbalanced environment.

Politico has assembled mini-essays from “more than 30 smart, macro thinkers” on what the outcomes from our corona virus experience will look like. This vapid, illogical quote sums up the entire project:

“It’s clear that in a crisis, the rules don’t apply—which makes you wonder why they are rules in the first place.”

Many of the missives are innocuous, giddy pie-in-the-sky platitudes heard in late-night college sophomore dorm discussions, but the underlying themes throughout include enforced solidarity and uniformity, obeisance to a leviathan government of infallible experts who will replace our fallible personal judgements, and an enforced end to those horrible old fashioned cultural practices that are not just stupid and un-scientific, but endanger us all.

There is also a common thread--squirming worm-like throughout--that names enemies of the Brave New Project: Donald Trump, petroleum industry, automobiles, eating meat, capitalism, privatized health care, personal liberty and autonomy, limited federal government.

A Brave New World

The authors envision a post-corona Brave New Future where government provides free college, free money, free health care and free child care, but for me their writings conjured scenes from a dystopian hellscape, everyone cossetted in their own sterile bubbles, peering out at fellow humans through plastic lenses and internet cameras while government instructions blare from social media outlets.

 Where the authors see an opportunity to force us all to eat soylent green (for our own good, of course) I see a totalitarian dystopia, sterilized of personal agency and genuine human love. I execrate almost all of the proposals in this article, except for improvements in medical care coverage and giving workers more resources to take care of themselves and their families, and I believe these goals can be accomplished without more government bureaucracy. Unfortunately, Republicans are not up to the herculean task of crafting intellectual and practical arguments against more big government.

Lost in all this is the fact that markets and freedom did not fail us—Big Government did

Please read the article and tell us what you think. Below I list a few of the best essays, the worst, and which ones I think are most likely to happen.

The Best

* The rise of telemedicine. Ezekiel J. Emanuel
* Regulatory barriers to online tools will fall. Katherine Mangu-Ward
* Congress can finally go virtual. Ethan Zuckerman
* Stronger domestic supply chains. Todd N. Tucker, Dambisa Moyo

Most Frightening

* Government becomes Big Pharma. Steph Sterling

The "brilliant thought leader" fails to realize that the private sector is not charged with planning for and fighting pandemics, government are, and they have largely failed. South Korea is an example of how a free market democratic nation successfully fights a pandemic.

Most Likely to Happen

* Expect a political uprising. Cathy O’Neil

But like any revolution, it will play out in wild and unpredictable ways, not how she predicts
* Stronger domestic supply chains. Todd N. Tucker, Dambisa Moyo
* A hunger for diversion. Mary Frances Berry

What say you?

Mull This Over....(With Addendum)

[source]

The video at THIS LINK with the title "‘We Should Never Let Someone Like That Run This Country’: Tucker Carlson Says Dr. Fauci’s Advice Could Lead To ‘National Suicide.’"

I couldn't embed the video, so you must go to the link to watch it.

Additional material, by Midnight Rider of Infidel Bloggers Alliance, dated April 4, 2020: A MESSAGE FROM THE BUNKER: 274,000 Americans infected with Covid Out of 330,000,000 Americans total = .08% --- Not .08 or 8% but 8 one hundredths of one percent.

You might find the comments to the above interesting, too. In those comments, I expressed my own concerns about the definition of the term "recovery":

Mr. AOW is "recovered" from his stroke of 2009. His recovery looks like this: basically paralyzed on his left side (he was left handed), hospital bed in the living room, bedside potty in the living room, needs help with just about every ADL you can think of, totally disabled.

Would you call the above a real recovery?

Addendum below the fold: inside intensive care unit at University College Hospital in London (8 minute video):

Voices From The Past

Please take a few minutes to watch the two short videos below:





Below is the most-watched YouTube documentary on the topic of the 1918 Spanish Flu epidemic — if you have time to watch (over 4 million views):


Now for my family's own stories.......


My father's younger sister, about age 7, died of "the aftereffects of the flu." Something like the 1990 film Awakenings? Full movie HERE at YouTube, albeit poor quality.  I highly recommend the film! It is available via Amazon Prime Video.

Dad occasionally spoke of what happened when his sister died: "The undertaker embalmed Chrissie at the house — and dumped the blood behind the barn."  The funeral service and burial were private.  The influenza didn't stop until everything was shut down: schools, funerals, churches, etc.  And the government refused to believe that something terrible was happening with Americans' health.  Until, that is, bodies began piling up on the sidewalks and in the streets of Washington, D.C.

My maternal grandmother (1898-1981) had a robust immune system. It fell to her to take care of her brother Walter, who brought influenza to their remote location in the mountains of East Tennessee when he was discharged from the US Army, fell ill himself, and gave the flu to his brother-in-law Fred, my grandmother's husband.  My grandmother sent her two children, one born in 1916 and the other in 1918 to her parents' farm and took care of Walter and Fred.

My grandmother related the story of those days in this way: "I got almost no sleep.  I went back and forth between the river for cold water and the menfolks' foreheads.  They were out of their heads with fever.  My sister brought food, called to me, and set the food down about 25 feet from the house; I fetched the food from there.  I don't remember how long all this went on.  Seemed like forever.  But Walter and Fred got well, and life went back to normal."

I asked Wawa how she stood those weeks of hard work as a nurse.  Her response: "Life isn't about what you want to do.  Life is about what you have to do."  She also told me of a particular safely measure she used: teetotaler though she was, she gargled in moonshine morning and evening.  And she swallowed that moonshine, too.

Bringing us back to today....A view of the front lines of this grim war against Coronavirus (dated March 23, 2020): The Growing Chaos Inside New York’s Hospitals.

And one more thing...in the immortal words of Gilda Radner:

Hecatombs

Silverfiddle Rant!

Life is all about trade-offs. If government action causes our economy to take a trillion dollar hit, with the goal of saving one million lives, that is one million dollars per human life saved.  One trillion dollars gone, and a shriveled economy now one trillion dollars less able to power the nation back to health.

Our economic engine is our strength to power through this, with technology, scientific breakthroughs, and everyday activity that produces wealth, but government has thrown the switch and the machine is now running on two cylinders.  It would be smarter and cheaper to take extraordinary measures to isolate and protect the vulnerable, while allowing the rest of us to get on with generating wealth by working and consuming, so we can fund the medical breakthroughs to beat this and prepare for future pandemics.

Below are excerpts from the WSJ article, WSJ - Rethinking the Coronavirus Shutdown.  The article is now hidden behind a paywall, which is why I have reposted whole paragraphs.

Thank you, CDC and public health officials.  We have learned much, and we have helped slow the disease by putting your lessons into practice:

The vast social-distancing project of the last 10 days or so has been necessary and has done much good. Warnings about large gatherings of more than 10 people and limiting access to nursing homes will save lives. The public has received a crucial education in hygiene and disease prevention, and even young people may get the message. With any luck, this behavior change will reduce the coronavirus spread enough that our hospitals won’t be overwhelmed with patients. Anthony Fauci, Scott Gottlieb and other disease experts are buying crucial time for government and private industry to marshal resources against the virus.

 At what cost?

In a normal recession the U.S. loses about 5% of national output over the course of a year or so. In this case we may lose that much, or twice as much, in a month.

The initial shutdown was supposed to last two weeks.  Let's adjust and try to do things smarter...

That will surely include strict measures to isolate and protect the most vulnerable—our elderly and those with underlying medical problems. This should not become a debate over how many lives to sacrifice against how many lost jobs we can tolerate.

But no society can safeguard public health for long at the cost of its overall economic health. 

 Even America’s resources to fight a viral plague aren’t limitless—and they will become more limited by the day as individuals lose jobs, businesses close, and American prosperity gives way to poverty.

America urgently needs a pandemic strategy that is more economically and socially sustainable than the current national lockdown.

Related:

Dear Congress: I’m A Small Business Owner. Here’s What My Business Needs To Survive

Destructive Destruction

Silverfiddle Rant!

Apologies to John Prine…

Daddy won't you take me back to Muhlenberg County,
Where good jobs are boomin' and men get good pay.
I'm sorry my son but you're too late in askin'
Mr. Jeff Bezos' website done hauled them away.

You can’t bring those Sears jobs Back

Is retail dead, destined for the obituaries along with the whale blubber industry that was replaced by kerosene lamps, which were replaced by the lightbulb?

What kind of new economy will give people meaningful work as technology ends up doing so much of what humans used to earn their living doing?

Is free money for everybody a solution? How would that work if nobody is working and paying taxes to fund it?

Will the world end up Silicon Valley’s vast domain, with the giants handing out monthly vouchers for us to shop at their company stores?

Bust the Trusts?

The gods That Failed

Silverfiddle Rant!

Many of the myriad McCain paeans took a fin de siècle tone: McCain was the last of the greats, etc.  Other pundits rebutted that, reminding us how McCain and his generation of global gods wrecked the world and couldn't do anything right: Korea and Vietnam were losses, the big financial crash in Bush the Dumber's last year, the rise of militant Islam, most of the globe still mired in poverty and misery...

The Cold War was the west's singular post-WW II victory, and had it not been for the triumvirate of Pope John Paul II, Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan putting the spurs to the timid, yapping UN diplomacy class, that might have never happened.

It's been ten years since the big financial crash of 2008. Joel Kotkin makes some observations in The Daily Beast...

"nine million jobs and nearly $20 trillion in household wealth were lost"

The financial collapse of 2008 is one of the elites' crowning achievement, up there with the Iraq and Afghanistan fiascos. People at the bottom lost everything, while people at the top lost nothing. Government gave us all an extra kick in the balls when they looted the treasury to bail out the malefactors. It was a gratuitous and unnecessary act of shameless malfeasance.

Bush the Dumber's great failure was not making the banksters eat their losses.

Now, according to Professor Kotkin, the economy is recovered, unevenly...

"Obama’s recovery was arguably the most unequal in American history, with 95 percent of all gains through 2013 going to the top one percent."

But President Trump is bringing some good news...

"Middle America is making a major comeback... Industrial employment reversed declines that were hitting at the end of the Obama years, growing by 327,000 jobs over the past year, the best performance since 1995."

"Trump may have shifted the geography of economic growth. The share of growth now taking place in non-metropolitan area America has increased fourfold. …"

"Meanwhile the states of the Resistance, New York and California, are now experiencing increasing domestic out-migration. The rate of population growth in California is among the country’s lowest—less than half that of Texas."

More Housing Bubbles...

"Median house prices in many deep blue enclaves areas have shot past their 2008 bubble peaks. In Portland, Seattle and San Francisco, prices are up 30 percent over the decade. In Denver, prices are up more than 80 percent. They have risen 60 percent in San Jose, where the median price for houses is now a staggering $1.4 million."

What have we learned?

Governments learned nothing. They failed to punish the guilty and they continue to sponsor private gains and socialized losses for the moneyed class and global corporations.

Booming urban housing markets have learned there's a sucker born every minute.

The rich elites who control global finance learned they can perpetrate economic catastrophes, pocket the loot, and leave the rest of us to crawl out from under the rubble.

The American people learned a few lessons. Per capita household debt is down, but millions of us have also learned how to live a transient life, chasing crappy low-paying jobs while living out of our cars.

Happy Days are Here Again!

** A Silverfiddle Post **

President Trump has unleashed the animal spirits of our economy. African American unemployment is at a record-low 6.8%.

Innovation + Productivity = Economic Miracle

Warren Buffett’s Time Essay gives us the most accurate and concise explanation of the economic miracle known as the United States of America. It is a message of hope that the greatest economic powerhouse the world has ever known will continue its unprecedented championship run.

“Two words explain this miracle: innovation and productivity. Conversely, were today’s Americans doing the same things in the same ways as they did in 1776, we would be leading the same sort of lives as our forebears.

“To all this good news there is, of course, an important offset: in our 241 years, the progress that I’ve described has disrupted and displaced almost all of our country’s labor force. If that level of upheaval had been foreseen–which it clearly wasn’t–strong worker opposition would surely have formed and possibly doomed innovation. How, Americans would have asked, could all these unemployed farmers find work?

“We know today that the staggering productivity gains in farming were a blessing. They freed nearly 80% of the nation’s workforce to redeploy their efforts into new industries that have changed our way of life.”

One of the many beauties of our nation is how our economy does organically “redeploy” workers to “new industries;” indeed that is one sign of a healthy, robust economy. Easy to do in boom times, but bad times leave cast-off workers mired in unemployment and despair. We are entering boom times, and we can’t allow all the hoopla to drown out the forgotten people.

Buffett closes his short essay with an optimistic challenge:

“The market system, however, has also left many people hopelessly behind, particularly as it has become ever more specialized. These devastating side effects can be ameliorated: a rich family takes care of all its children, not just those with talents valued by the marketplace.

“In the years of growth that certainly lie ahead, I have no doubt that America can both deliver riches to many and a decent life to all. We must not settle for less.”

I agree. How do we do this?

How do we "ameliorate" the "devastating side effects" and help those left behind catch up?

How do we build an America that will “deliver riches to many and a decent life to all?”

Video: Ball of Confusion

Kid recently stated at Z's blog (emphasis mine):

Yes, a lot of people would love to be poor in America. Many have poured across the border now for decades, and if we didn’t have oceans separating us from the rest....

Still Democrats do maintain the lower standard of living areas in America.

From 1971. You’d think it was today.

Then Kid quoted the lyrics from the Temptations' tune "Ball of Confusion (That's What the World Is Today)."

Here is the "Ball of Confusion," with lyrics (apologies to FreeThinke, who will, no doubt, wish to silence the sound track):


Truly...

There is no new thing under the sun. — Ecclesiastes 1:9b (KJV)

Charts: The Obama Years

Obama's approval ratings are still around 50% (according to CNN on October 6, 2012, at a new high of 55%)  — despite the ominous information provided in the charts below (click directly on the graphic to enlarge it):

from Federal Reserve data

From Powerline, which published the above charts on October 5, 2016:

...[T]he stock market has more than doubled since the bottom of March 2009, though this has everything to do with the Fed’s insane zero-interest rate policy than anything Obama has done. Lawrence Lindsay noted in the Wall Street Journal yesterday that Obama’s economic record is a failure when judged by Obama’s own claims for what his policies would accomplish....

Read the rest HERE.

The stock market doesn't mean diddly squat to middle class Americans who cannot afford to invest in that particular market. Furthermore, the stock market is but one measure of the nation's economic health.

Do you want four more years of the above or a chance for something else?  Vote accordingly.

Obamanomics (With Addendum)

Accurate or not?  If accurate, what do these numbers portend? Click directly on the image to enlarge it.

[source]

UPDATED ABBOTT AND COSTELLO

FreeThinke's comment to this thread — after the release of the horrible job numbers for May 2016:

ABBOTT and COSTELLO'S BRILLIANT EXPLANATION of a CRUCIAL ISSUE

COSTELLO: I want to talk about the unemployment rate in America.

ABBOTT: Good Subject. Terrible Times. It’s 5.6%.

COSTELLO: That many people are out of work?

ABBOTT: No, that’s 23%.

COSTELLO: You just said 5.6%.

ABBOTT: 5.6% Unemployed.

COSTELLO: Right 5.6% out of work.

ABBOTT: No, that’s 23%.

COSTELLO: Okay, so it’s 23% unemployed.

ABBOTT: No, that’s 5.6%.

COSTELLO: WAIT A MINUTE. Is it 5.6% or 23%?

ABBOTT: 5.6% are unemployed. 23% are out of work.

COSTELLO: If you are out of work you are unemployed.

ABBOTT: No, Obama said you can’t count the “Out of Work” as the unemployed. You have to look for work to be unemployed.

COSTELLO: BUT THEY ARE OUT OF WORK!!!

ABBOTT: No, you miss his point.

COSTELLO: What point?

ABBOTT: Someone who doesn’t look for work can’t be counted with those who look for work. It wouldn’t be fair.

COSTELLO: To whom?

ABBOTT: The unemployed.

COSTELLO: But ALL of them are out of work.

ABBOTT: No, the unemployed are actively looking for work. Those who are out of work gave up looking and if you give up, you are no longer in the ranks of the unemployed.

COSTELLO: So if you’re off the unemployment roles that would count as less unemployment?

ABBOTT: Unemployment would go down. Absolutely!

COSTELLO: The unemployment just goes down because you don’t look for work?

ABBOTT: Absolutely it goes down. That’s how it gets to 5.6%. Otherwise it would be 23%.

COSTELLO: Wait, I got a question for you. That means there are two ways to bring down the unemployment number?

ABBOTT: Two ways is correct.

COSTELLO: Unemployment can go down if someone gets a job?

ABBOTT: Correct.

COSTELLO: And unemployment can also go down if you stop looking for a job?

ABBOTT: Bingo.

COSTELLO: So there are two ways to bring unemployment down, and the easier of the two is to have people stop looking for work.

ABBOTT: Now you’re thinking like a Democrat.

COSTELLO: I don’t even know what the hell I just said!

ABBOTT: Now you’re thinking like Hillary!

As of Friday, June 3, 2016, 94,044,000 Americans are neither employed nor seeking employment — according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. What are all of these individuals doing with their "free time"?

ADDENDUM

As Silverfiddle commented below:

For those who mistakenly try to pin the labor participation rate on baby boomers retiring, see the chart about half way down "Labor Force Participation Rate: 25-54 Years."

Hillary will give us more of the same.

HERE is the link referenced in Silverfiddle's comment.  The graphic therefrom (click to enlarge:

Economic Reality

How is this not a death spiral?

I'm glad that I'm as old as I am. Our posterity will have it really rough.