No Way Like the Obama Way! 10 More Years of Depression?

Obama's wholesale assault against the US private sector promises to produce decades-long historically high unemployment and skyrocketing debts at all levels of government. The Obama regime's job-killing, industry-killing agenda of energy starvation is particularly hard on employment, when combined with an overall attitude of private wealth destruction flowing out of DC.

The conventional wisdom among economists is that the economy will be forced to go through a long adjustment process before it can get back to more normal rates of unemployment. The optimists put the return to normal at 2015, while the pessimists would put the year as 2018, and possibly, even later.

Furthermore, many economists believe that the new normal will be worse than the old normal. The unemployment rate bottomed out at 4.5% before the housing bubble began to burst. If we go back to 2000, the United States had a year-round average unemployment rate of just 4.0%. The optimists now envision that normal would be 5.0% unemployment, while the pessimists put the new normal at 6.0% unemployment and perhaps higher. As a point of reference, every percentage point rise in the unemployment corresponds to more than 2 million additional people without jobs.

The willingness of economists to so quickly embrace this darker future is striking. _ImpactLab

The reality is that the US economy is on a collision course with the exponential increase in government debt, combined with increased suffocating government regulations, mandates, taxes, penalties, fines, licenses . . .

The very idea of a "return to normal" under these rapidly worsening conditions -- particularly when combined with Obama's anti-energy, anti-industry stance -- is profoundly delusional.

Here are more details on what happens when Obama's "green energy" scheme is put in place (in the UK):

Britain’s world lead in wind development is primarily because of two major natural advantages: Britain has the windiest conditions in Europe along with the longest continuous coastline. In short, if wind power can’t work in Britain it cannot work anywhere else. But fail it did yet again this winter. Indeed, as it has for most of the last 12 winters.


Figures released in early January showed that as temperatures plunged to well below freezing and electric power demand soared, electricity production at Britain’s 3,100+ wind turbines fell from an average of 8.6 percent of Britain’s electricity mix to just 1.8 percent. Instead of serving up to 3 million homes, wind farms were serving just 30,000 homes, a mere one-hundredth of normal capacity. On the evening of December 20 Britain’s average temperature fell to minus 5.6 celsius. At 6.30 that evening, the nation’s wind farms, which claim a generating capacity of 5.2 GW of electricity, were actually generating a piffling 40 MW, the equivalent of 20 turbines working at full capacity.


As Jeremy Nicholson, director of the UK Energy Intensive Users Group, states, “What is worrying is that these sorts of figures are not a one-off. It was exactly the same last January and February when high pressure brought freezing cold temperatures, snow and no wind.” Nicholson added, “We can cope at the moment because there is still not that much power generated by wind. But all this will change. What happens when we are dependent on wind turbines for 30 percent of our power and there is suddenly a period when the wind does not blow and there is high demand?”


When British wind farms were reportedly producing “practically no electricity” over a similar period in 2010 the British Government was forced to ask 95 major industrial consumers to turn off their gas pipelines. Nobody knows how much that cost the country. Back then, Nicholson stated, “If we had this 30 GW of wind power [the government’s stated goal for 2030] it wouldn’t have contributed anything of significance this winter.”


After this month’s repeat of the wind power-out, Nicholson observed that while the government was well aware of the problem, there was a need for a massive back-up infrastructure. “But it will cost billions to put these measures in place,” explains Nicholson, “and we will have to pick up the tab”. Yet another cost that advocates fail to factor in. _EnergyTribune

In other words, under the Obama green scheme people will not only be impoverished and unemployed, but they will also be freezing cold and in the dark, without power.

Well, at least Americans can take comfort in the fact that they are responsible for their own demise.