The economy is contracting again. The last quarter while Obama was touting his economic prowess and the slowly improving economic situation the economy was actually in decline. Not only did it decline it did so in the middle of the holiday season, a time when it should of received a bump. Although the main steam media called the news surprising it shouldn’t be. Especially not for those following the so called economic recovery.

In the days before the discoveries that created modern medicine doctors were prone to bleed their patients and even use poisonous substances in their treatments. In South America shaman’s often dance around shaking smoking weeds and repeat magic incantations to attempt the same. The best that can be said is at least the shaman is doing no harm. Modern medicine now knows that bleeding does not help the sick to get well and poisons do not make good cures but apparently President Obama never got that message. The President’s economic policy has been to bleed businesses with new taxes along with applying liberal amounts of regulatory poison. He has even tried blowing smoke and repeating magic incantations like “we have just begun” and “forward.” All to no more success than bleeding helped people with chicken pox.

Lucky for him, the Federal Reserve had created enough of an economic illusion to spur his reelection (that and a magical drop in unemployment just before the election). The injections of freshly printed money into the economy has kept it animated enough to make it seem as though things are getting better. Like a burned out junkie on a drug induced high, the cost of this modicum of apparent growth will be substantial. If the pumping of cash into the economy stopped it would go into spasmodic fits like a junkie going cold turkey. On the other hand, the longer it continues to drug the economy the greater the side effect of inflation will be and greater the economic drop when the bubble of false growth is burst. Problems that look like they may be comings sooner than later.

The recent quarter of negative growth and increasing unemployment claims may not be certain proof the so called “recovery” is over but it does show that real economic recovery is as far away now as it has ever been. If the trend continues the U.S. will officially be back in recession. The fact is if the artificial illusionary growth induced by the FED were not part of the equation the U.S. would probably be officially in a depression.

The President and his supporters are either lining up others to blame for the bad economic reports or ignoring the reports all together. The tag lines in many news stories cited the debt negotiations or even the fear of coming military cuts as the culprits. If one looks hard enough it is likely some even blamed Bush. Almost all swept the whole story off their front pages as quickly as possible, if it ever appeared there at all.

The reports not only imply but shout Obama’s policies are an absolute failure. Unfortunately facts do not matter for those blinded by their own desire to remold the real world into something that only exist in their imagination. For them the dream is too splendid to let reality or human suffering get in the way.

The truth is the President’s economic incompetence is only surpassed by inability to properly address the country’s deficits. Labor participation rates have flat lined to what they were in the 1970’s. The result is that for years now the real real unemployment rate has been near 11% and the underemployment rate around 17.5%. The term most often used to describe the Obama economy is fragile, a term that may be optimistic if anything. The U.S. economy is more like a shattered vase held together with Federal Reserve Tape and a few spots of energy sector glue; a vase that at anytime has been in danger of coming apart.

With the full impact of the twins of devastation, ObamaCare and Dodd-Frank, still unfolding and an onslaught of new costly taxes regulations on their way any recovery at all will have to come out of the shear will and determination of America’s entrepreneurs. Determination, as the latest news shows, is not enough when your government seems dead set against you. Time will tell if this latest contraction in the economy and rise in the unemployment rate is s a trend that is going to continue or if anemic growth will return. No matter what the next few months bring the latest stats are proof the U.S. economy is in a lot of trouble and the man sitting in the White House is a lot of the reason why.

“The Conservative Mind”

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(Associated story: Data from Pew Research says multigenerational households that include parents, grandparents and adult children becoming more normal, Read Here)