The news media, the president and Ben Bernanke would have you believe that the economy is getting better. The talk about economic indicators. They talk about GDP, CPI, consumer confidence, anticipated job growth and so on. Most of these are either not good indicators of life in the real world or they are manipulated to seem better than what they are.
A Real World, Street Smart Economic Indicator
America, keep your eyes on dogs. When you start seeing skinny dogs, you know it’s gone from bad to worse. When you start seeing skinny dogs (and more strays) it will be a clear indicator people are really cutting back and things are getting tough. When push comes to shove, Fido falls below Mom, Dad and the kids. Therefore, skinny dogs mean people are cutting back so much that they are skimping on pet food in order to feed the humans in the house well and just get by.
They won’t teach this one in the university economics classes, but it’s likely better than what the government offers the public.
Government & Media Economic Indicators
They speak of a couple economic indicators all the time. Both are usually nonsense. They tend to be filled with econo-babble and overly sophisticated explanations.
Estimated Job Growth
Using baked numbers they will tell you there is job growth. There isn’t any real job growth. They simply made false assumptions to massage the figures so the shill media could report something positive, although inaccurate. Politics is like that. The last jobs report said that 217,000 new jobs were created. Later, and much more quietly, they had to say the number was wrong. Why? Here’s what they forgot to tell you. The people putting this report together figured since it’s a time of year when businesses are started, well that means there will be a lot of those people back to work. They just made that assumption. Then they just assumed that those businesses would hire a couple people each and figured that into the number. These assumptions accounted for over 100,000 of the 217,000. Not exactly a reliable economic indicator.
Further more, jobs alone tell us nothing about a healthy economy. What kind of jobs? If the government were to hire 100,000 people for the sake of job creation alone (hiring for hiring sake) they would be serving no real need. They would not be supplying products or services to fill demand. Therefore, they are non-productive jobs serving no productive economic purpose and not creating any profit. Where there is no profit there is no room for new real job growth. Plus, to create government jobs, the money is taken from people’s paychecks and simply transferred over to the new government employees. This is wasteful. It is wealth destruction and destroys long term job growth.
Spending Figures
The other standard so-called indicator of economic strength is increased spending. They tell us increased spending is a sign of an improving economy. What? Spending tells us how strong an economy is? Since when?
There was a figure on a radio show this week saying America borrows $188 million dollars an hour. We spend all of that borrowed money. That’s a sign of health?
Currently our government is going to raise our debt ceiling because $14,300,000,000,000.00 isn’t enough debt for them apparently. They want to spend more. So, more spending will increase our debt and make us poorer. How is increased spending making us better off?
Any fool can spend money he doesn’t have, and he usually does. You can see this every day with American politicians. To show how foolish the idea that increased spending is a sign of economic improvement really is, let’s look at a more real world example.
Let’s imagine for a moment that your family had an average income, car payments, credit card debt, student loans, a mortgage, rising utility bills, rising food and gas costs. This is not uncommon. Let’s say during the real estate boom economy you got a little carried away and really bought a lot of toys. You got a new house, bought TVs, new computers, furniture and so on. You now have lots of debt. The amount of income you have to save, reduce debt and use for everyday living has now become very thin. If you go out and borrow more money to spend even more, have you somehow improved your household economy? No. You are just making things a lot worse.
So, how is increased spending going to help America? It won’t. It is one of the things that is destroying America.
Get Real About The Economy
If you have a genuine concern about the economy you need to get real. You need to learn fundamental economic principles and think about things in real world terms. You can either go on believing that increased spending is a good economic indicator, as the media tells you, or you can look around and use your head. You can see the value of the dollar decreasing. You can notice rising food prices and gas prices and understand it’s a result of artificially low interest rates and money printing (The Federal Reserve Bank’s policies). You can think about what real life economic warning signs are. Then when you start seeing dogs getting skinny you will know what is going on out there. It’s up to you. Spoon fed or street smart?
