The stock market is just about the only positive indicator to rise above the frozen tundra of the Obama economy. GDP is flatlined; the workforce is collapsing; every flicker of life in manufacturing, consumer confidence, or housing is quickly extinguished; but the stock market has been doing quite well.
One big reason the stock market has been doing well is the “quantitative easing” program by the Federal Reserve, which is basically printing bales of money and dropping it off at the stock exchange. It’s like running an extension cord from the Dow to Washington and plugging it into the Federal Reserve. This has been contributing to a slow erosion in the standard of living for everyone else, but inflation is very well hidden these days – the government learned some lessons about exposing the true weakness of the economy back in the Carter years. Huge amounts of public money have also been pumped into crony corporations that have good connections with the White House and flatter its ideology.
The “income inequality” President Obama and his allies are always nattering on about has actually gotten worse under his policies. That’s because his policies destroy the incentives to create wealth in a manner that would benefit the broadest possible cross-section of the economy: creating or expanding entrepreneurial ventures and hiring people. The entire Obama economic plan is fifty shades of grey for the entrepreneur, and the only way to escape the handcuffs is to reduce the size of your full-time staff, scale down your operations, and minimize your tax exposure.
Insider trading by Congress was so bad that a law had to be passed last year cracking down on it. The President just signed a rollback of some of its reporting provisions for federal employees, although those provisions still cover top officials and members of Congress.
This all adds up to a fairly blatant feeding frenzy at the public trough by the ruling class – politicians and their favorite supporters. The Democrats are even making moves to help the Big Media wing of the ruling class by trimming the First Amendment back, so it only covers government-approved “real journalists” – you know, the people who got everything about the Washington Navy Yard shooting wrong, and spent days trying to magically insert an AR-15 Big Scary Rifle into the story, because their stupid ideology insisted such a weapon had to be there.
You can tell the Democrats don’t expect anyone outside the ruling class to improve their lot any time soon, because they just lost their cookies over efforts to trim five percent from a food stamp budget that doubled under Obama. They love the idea of having a huge dependency class that depends on the largess of the aristocracy to survive. That’s not a bug in Economy Version 2.0, it’s a core feature.