Our View: ‘Stagnation Nation’

Whew, what a surreal last 36 hours this has been. It all started, of course, with reports of the GDP’s “unexpected” contraction of 0.1 percent in the fourth quarter of 2012.

In and of itself, this news was sufficient to suggest America has become, if not an economic reflection of Europe (see “Today’s Quote” above), then at the very least “Stagnation Nation.” Or sufficiently languid for us to lugubriously state, “Welcome to the New Normal, to an economy hooked on stimulus and ‘quantitative easing,’ and to a nation getting by, as it were, only through an addiction to borrowing that will, in time, catch up with us.”

Pipers must be paid eventually, a maxim that further indicates there’s no substitute for growth — real growth, where the right people do the moving, the shaking, and, most of all, the job-creating and wealth-creating across the broad spectrum of the economy.

Jobs, did you say? Well, there’s news aplenty on that front, too. Jobless claims for the week ending Jan. 26 checked in at 368,000, or 38,000 more than expected. And yet, for some reason, the White House, as reported by the Associated Press, has decided to let its Jobs Council — which met all of four times in two years — expire.

So maybe columnist Michelle Malkin is right (see her latest offering below)when she says the 23 million Americans out of work are no longer a “top priority” of an administration lured like a moth to the political fires of gun control and immigration reform. Still, we can expect the White House to revel in the latest jobs report, slated for release today. Expectations hint at growth, anemic though it may be, in the neighborhood of 192,000 jobs.