The Wonky Economy
This must be one of the strangest economies ever faced in the modern era. We have too many job openings. We don’t have enough workers to fill these job openings. There have been record numbers of workers who quit their jobs—ostensibly to find better paying jobs, according to the U.S. Department of Labor—and continuing jobless claims have fallen from 2.8 million in September 2021 to 1.9 million in late November, kind of dispelling the myth that a bunch of basement-dwelling 30-somethings are sitting out Armageddon on the government teat (but maybe they are there, sucking off mom’s and dad’s instead). Unemployment is reportedly around 4.2% (is that a real number?). The trade deficit has lessened. The stock market is at an all-time high, though staying flat lately.
And yet…
…a steady stream of new illegal laborers are entering the market from the Southern border. Inflation is through the roof. The supply chain is dysfunctional. The price for natural gas and oil is sharply up and energy supplies are sharply down. Even Santa’s supply of coal for stockings is pinched. The government is printing and spending like sailors on shore leave. The current administration has done possibly everything it can to destroy the largest economy in the world. Small businesses are failing at record numbers while earnings for multinational corporations are booming. The rich are getting richer; the rest of us are eating dirt.
Much of this is caused by the self-destructive tyrant wannabes who still cling to the Vaseline-slathered slope of the Covid crusade. All of this is self-inflicted.
Ginger Snap, aka Jen Psaki, has termed our economic situation as the tragedy of the delayed treadmill. I’m not sure if she was playing off the Tragedy of the Commons—I don’t giver her that much credit—but maybe if the administration, for which she runs cover, understood the destructiveness of socialism, things might be different.
But it won’t be. There is an agenda.
It’s as if something sinister may be afoot—a grand puppeteer pulling strings—but none of us really knows what. It’s purgatory, a bad psychotic dream of Kafkaesque proportions.
The dark winter of discontent is upon us. Bundle up.