Here is subhead for a front-page story on the economy in today’s Washington Post:
Stocks tumble after data on manufacturing, jobs and home prices dash sunny expectations.
Whose “sunny expectations”?
C’mon. Does anybody really have sunny expectations for the economy two years into the most aggressively anti-business administration in American history? Well, yeah, the White House may, and the mainstream media is perpetually surprised by “unexpected” bad economic news. But most of us aren’t surprised. We know that this administration is pursuing policies that can lead only to a dismal economy. Daniel Henninger writes in today’s Wall Street Journal:
It is sometimes unfair to tag presidents with blame for an underperforming economy. Not this time. This president made conscious policy choices during a deep recession to reorder vast swaths of American industry. Strong-performing economies need clarity. Barack Obama has given ours indecision stretching to the horizon. And economic growth, like a long gray day, sits still below 3%.
Larry Kudlow’s takeaway from yesterday’s awful performance and other indicators on Wall Street:
There’s a key message here: Big-government stimulus never works.
Kudlow points out other ways in which the current administration keeps the economy from sending out green shoots:
But if there was a serious pro-growth movement in Washington to accelerate tax-reform overhaul and pin-back regulatory barriers like the NLRB war with Boeing, the EPA war against energy, and the Obamacare threats that are too numerous to count, that just might revive the animal spirits. But what we know for sure is that small businesses are barely hiring today, and that brand new startups are few and far between.
I don’t know about you, but I am going to save my sunny expectations for a time when we have an administration that is run on sound economic ideas instead of faculty lounge ideology.