There’s no way to stretch out the holidays any further, and unless you’re lucky enough to occupy a high government office it’s time to get back to work and the long, hard grind through winter. For us that means resuming our reading of the news, among other things, although with all those high government officials still on vacation there’s not much there except the miserable weather.
Last year around this time the weather was just as miserable, but many of the media were eager to use that as an explanation for the upcoming miserable data showing a quarterly contraction in the economy. This time around the same media were disappointed that the holidays distracted attention from a robust 5 percent in the gross domestic product over the past quarter, and don’t seem eager to speculate how the frigid temperatures prevailing just about everywhere north of the Florida keys might slow the long awaited Obama boom. This is no time to be touting the president’s, so they’re filling the news hole the airtime with talk of that GDP figure and the the recent decline in gasoline prices and the slow but steady growth in the jobs market and the record highs in the stock market. Except for the college and professional football playoffs and the usual internecine Republican squabbles and the miserable weather there’s not much else, so their giddiness is understandable.
They won’t want too much attention paid to the economic news, of course, lest the public notice how the rosy reports differ from it own frost-bitten reality. The smart guys at Zero Hedge always manage to find the dark cloud within any silver lining, and they noticed that much of that 5 percent growth last quarter was achieved by an increase in consumer spending on higher health insurance premiums that was supposed to be counted in the contracting winter quarter that the government had already written off and was instead added to the far most robust report they’re now crowing about. Such Chinese-style statistical legerdemain is by now a common feature of the long awaited Obama boom, as is the apparent assumption by many of the media that paying higher health insurance premiums rather than the lower ones promised during the Obamacare sales job is a benefit to the economic well-being of the nation, and has thus gone largely unmentioned by many of the media.
That slow but steady growth in the jobs market has not raised the labor participation rate from the lowest level since the ’70s, largely because the number of legal and illegal immigrants has increased at a slightly faster and just as steady rate. The president’s extra-constitutional to confer amnesty on millions of illegal immigrants and thereby invite millions more is being touted by many of the media as part of his remarkable comeback after the mid-term election shellacking, along his with extra-constitutional agreement with the Chinese to combat global warming, but they probably won’t too much attention paid to that.
Those plunging gasoline prices are hard to ignore while shivering next to the pumps, but it will take a lot of doing by many of the media to make anyone think that the president’s policies have anything to do with it. The same president who made a campaign promise of skyrocketing electrical rates and appointed an Energy Secretary who openly pined for European gasoline prices and has denied drilling permits on federal land deserves no credit for America’s frackin’ oil boom, and any attempt he makes to claim credit will only make him seem all George W. Bushy and diminish his standing with the environmentalists of his party. The happily deflationary effects of lower gasoline prices will only encourage the Federal Reserve to keep up the money-printing that has fueled those bubbly record stock market indices, however, and somehow the president will get credit for that without losing his standing among the Wall Street-hating socialists of his party.
Nor will many of the media wonder if the Republican obstructionism and gridlock they’ve decried the past four years have anything with those rosy numbers they’re touting. Since the Republicans gained control of the House of the Representatives after two years of complete Democratic control of the Congress and presidency, and the officially reported deficits have gone down and government spending as a percentage of the Gross Domestic Product has also declined, both which conservative economic theory considers a spur to economic growth, but better to report on those crazy conservatives’ challenge to the relatively timid House leadership. No use pointing out that most of the nation’s economic growth has occurred in states controlled by Republicans, either, especially when the governors of the most successful of them are among the contenders for the ’16 presidential race that is already affecting the reporting of many of the media.
Judging by the miserable weather forecasts we probably won’t be getting out of the house until then, and although the question seems of little interest to much of the media we can’t help wondering what effect it will have the economy if the rest of the country is similarly to get out to the store, but at least we’re back on the job and following what there is the of the news.
— Bud Norman
The Central Standard Times 
