Happy Days Are Here Again or If You Set The Bar Low Enough Everyone Gets A Gold Star

Pop those corks and let the bubbly flow. The Democrats took control of both houses of Congress in 2006. It took them a couple of years to crash the economy but by George they did it.

So now we hear that unemployment has fallen to 7.5 %. Holy Recovery, Batman!

Not to kill your buzz, but let us take a longer view of the situation.

BTW, both of these charts were taken from The Bureau of Labor Statistics. We have to go back to the early 90's to find a time when unemployment touched 7.5 % and we ran the first George Bush out of town for allowing that. 

In fairness to the Dems, the GOP took back one House of Congress in 2010 and has held it since then. But Speaker Boehner and his RINOs have betrayed their own party and for all practical purposes the Democrats run Congress if only by proxy.

Oh, and it has taken almost six years for the Dow to recover its 2007 high water mark. More bubbly. What price did we pay for our renaissance? Disaster in every other viable statistic, most significantly, our debt.

The doubling of our national debt has not fueled a recovery. 7.5 % unemployment! Pop those corks, baby!

The Dow Drops 512 Points On Obama's Birthday: How Apropos!

1. Blame Bush.

2. Blame The Tea Party.

3. Remind the Faithful that change might not materialize until 2097.

4. Jump on Air Force 1 to hop from city to city to denounc ecorporate jets.

5. Blame Bush.

6. Blame Speculators.

7. Order The Justice Department To investigate speculators.

8. Look For Shovel Ready Jobs.

9. Bash millionaires and billionaires.

10. Balance the budget by forcing Geithner to pony up on his back taxes.

The Crossroads in the Rearview Mirror.

An editorial I have wanted to write for several years is "America at the Crossroads." That might sound like a bit of MSM hokum but we truly were at a crossroads. Simply put, American could become more Asiatic and compete with Japan, China, India, Korea, Malaysia, Singapore, et al. Or we could throw in the towel and become more European. We could celebrate our has been status, our economic underachievement, our sloth. We could celebrate our green sanctimony and our conspicuous compassion and do nothing almost as well as our European cousins. Let the Asians do all the work.

That editorial is a dream deferred. I was doing blogs but nothing remotely political. So America slept while I let my "Crossroads" simmer on the back burner. As I waited, America fled the crossroads. With the election of Obama, America gunned a trail down the Euro Highway leaving our glorious past in a cloud of dust.

Yesterday, Monday May 18, 2009, The Dow rose about 2%. Meanwhile, the Nifty (India's version of the Dow. Got to love that name.) rose 17%. Granted, India is coming off a recent election. But the nature of markets is such that a rally in Japan will be felt to a lesser degree in China and in Europe and in the US. The Dow rose largely in reaction to India's rally. And like a bunch of Euros who contented themselves with crumbs all those years as America feasted, we Americans now settled for crumbs.

Such will be the trend. Asia and Eastern Europe will prosper. Western Europe will affect a sense of superiority and pseudosophistication for not working as hard as the Asians. Ze stupid ant cannot comprehend ze smart grassahopper. What will America do? Americans will mimic their stylish European cousins and will look foolish in the process.

We thought that maybe someday we would be has beens, if we let our guard down. But I for one did not know that we would embrace that status as a badge of honor. I did not think that we would select leaders who would hasten the process. I did not think we would commit economic suicide. But America is fast becoming a distant memory as we race deeper into the land of minute growth and double digit unemployment.

The question now seems to be, "Can we find our way back to the crossroads?"