RECOVERY, WHAT RECOVERY???

I know I said I would have nothing more to say about Barry’s idiotic State of the Union Address, but it would seem that I just can’t help myself.  Because try as I might I simply could not get past how it was that during his ‘Statist’ of the Union address, Barry referenced the "growing" U.S. economy at least three times, but "recovery" only once.  Specifically, he claimed that "thanks to a ‘growing’ economy, the ‘recovery’ is touching more and more lives."  For him to put forth the argument that a recovery is underway was pure politics?  And I would argue that no such recovery is underway because the economy is not growing, at least not in any meaningful way.

The recovery of which Barry spoke, and begrudgingly acknowledged is still in progress 5-1/2 long years after we were told the recession was to have ended, would seem to have a great deal more "touching" to do.  Because it was on January 12, that the National Association of Counties (NAcO) released a detailed study which most of those in the state-controlled media ignored, but which would have been front-page news in a Republican administration. The NACo report showed that only 65 of the nation's 3,069 counties have recovered from the recession. That's bad enough, but even with that ugly statistic, the results involved are much worse than they appear.

Because the 2014 County Economic Tracker shows that only a mere 65 counties of the nation’s 3,069 have met or surpassed prerecession levels in four measured, and very important, categories: jobs, unemployment rate, economic output and home prices.  And as it just so happens, there are some very interesting extenuating circumstances in that these ‘recovered’ counties are largely located in energy-rich areas and have very small populations.  You see, of those 65 recovered counties, 24 are in Texas and 16 are in North Dakota. The others are generally in the middle of the country, including nine in Minnesota and eight in Kansas.

Not one of the recovered counties has more than 500,000 residents.  Far more important, a detailed look at 2013 Census data using the bureau's interactive tool indicates that none of the recovered counties has more than 200,000 residents.  Also, as seen in the chart at the very top of this piece, 34 of the counties, or over half, have populations of under 10,000.  The 65 fully-recovered counties represent just over 2 percent of all U.S. counties, but their total population of under 1.4 million is less than one-half of one percent of the nation's total. This means that 99.56 percent of Americans live in counties which have not come back to where they were in 2007. 

And yet, Barry “Almighty” and his many acolytes in the state-controlled media continue to crow about how well the economy is going.  It’s simply unreal.  We’ve all seen how the numbers have been, and continue to be, manipulated in order to present a false picture of where our country is when it comes to our economy and our continuing employment problem.  For instance, something Barry never talks about is how we have over 90 million people who are no longer in workforce.  The American workforce is the smallest that it has been since the late 70s, while at the same time we have more Americans than ever before dependent upon government.

We are constantly being told that we are in the midst of some great, albeit a slow moving, economic recovery.  Yet over the course of his presidency, there is not one thing, not one, that Barry and his Democrats have done that had the specific purpose of making our economy stronger or getting people back to work.  Because to do such a thing would run completely counter to the political/economic philosophy possessed by their party.  Because, you see, the goal of the Democrats has always been to create an environment that has its net result, increasing the number of unemployed and to then entice them into becoming increasingly dependent upon government.