Pence, Not Withstanding

More good news, my fellow Americans!  The Obaconomy is sinking further into the crapper, and y'all are darned good and aware of it!  Revel in the New Prosperity!:

Americans’ confidence in the economy eroded further in July amid worries about a job market that has proven stubbornly stagnant. The report raised concerns about the overall economy and the back-to-school season.

The Conference Board, a private research group, said Tuesday that its Consumer Confidence Index slipped to 50.4 in July, down from the revised 54.3 in June. Economists surveyed by Thomson Reuters expected 51.0. The decline follows last month’s nearly ten-point drop, from 62.7 in May, which marked the biggest since February, when the measure also fell 10 points.

The second straight month of declining confidence follows three months of increases. …

One component of the Consumer Confidence Index, which measures how people feel now about the economy now, declined to 26.1, from 26.8. The other barometer, which measures respondent’s outlook over the next six months, declined to 66.6, from 72.7 last month.

Hey, at least Reuters was expecting a decline, and their expectation made it onto the green.

What's driving this wonderful pessimism (Remember, on ObamaWorld everything is the opposite of what it is in the real world)?  What else?  Chronically high unemployment:

Consumers’ appraisal of the job market was also more negative. Those claiming jobs are “hard to get” increased to 45.8% from 43.5%, while those saying jobs are “plentiful” remained unchanged at 4.3%....

Consumers were also more pessimistic about future job prospects. Those expecting more jobs in the months ahead decreased to 14.3% from 16.2%, while those anticipating fewer jobs increased to 21.1% from 20.1%. The proportion of consumers expecting an increase in their incomes declined to 10.0% from 10.6%.

This is called rationalism.  As opposed to, say, the regime lunatics who brought us the 21st century "W.I.N." buttons known as "Recovery Summer".  When real unemployment has been in double-digits and underemployment in the high teens ever since Red Barry's Immaculation, the average working stiff tends to draw the not unreasonable conclusion that things aren't going to get any better any time soon, and pull back on their consumer spending accordingly.  Similarly, when employers have gotten smashed Hogzilla, ObamaCare, FinReg, and have cripple & tax on the way via presidential edict and the expiration of the Bush tax cuts to look forward to, they do what anybody in the path of a tornado would do: board up the windows, batten down the hatches, and go hide in the basement.  They certainly aren't going to expose what remains of their capital to that statist tempest via either capital expenditures or expanding their payrolls.

Except this tornado is the size of a hurricane:

The Congressional Budget Office today released a new report on the risk of a fiscal crisis occuring in the United States due to our long-term debt, and its conclusions largely echo points that I've been trying to make repeatedly.

The bottom line is that the longer we prolong dealing with our debt problem, the greater the risk of a fiscal crisis, and the more unattractive the options become for digging ourself out of the mess.

While naturally looking at tax increases through static analytical eyes, CBO does at least rotely acknowledge the economic damage tax increases during a severe economic downturn will do:

It outlines several consequences for growing debt, including crowding out of private investment and the need for higher taxes and/or spending cuts. Of higher taxes, however, it warns that, "To the extent that additional tax revenues were generated by increasing marginal tax rates, those rates would discourage work and saving, further reducing output and incomes."

....wiping out most or all of that "additional tax revenue," creating a downward spiral of trying to seize more and more of less and less, and hastening the final day of reckoning - to which Red Barry is looking forward like I eagerly anticipated my wedding night:

Once a fiscal crisis actually occurs, the options get even worse. They include restructuring debt or causing inflation, both of which would run the risk of raising interest rates for government to brorrow money. Inflation would not only have negative economic consequences, but it would also increase future deficits. As an example: "if inflation was 1 percentage point higher over the next decade than the rate CBO has projected, budget deficits during those years would be roughly $700 billion larger."

The adjective "crumbling" comes to mind.  Bear in mind that this dire endgame is the regime's deliberate, set-in-concrete fiscal policy.  They are bankrupting the country deliberately, either because they're truly so stupid as to believe that they really can "spend us rich", or to precipitate a Greek-like crisis big enough to enable a direct presidential coup de tat.

Tiny Tim let another glimpse into that sinister attitude slip over the weekend when he gaffed that the country can "withstand" an anti-capitalist, anti-Keynesian, fiscally insane expiration of the Bush tax cuts, dropping the biggest tax increase yet on this already staggering U.S. economy like a cobalt bomb.  That's how he sold massively higher taxes: You can "withstand" them.

This sheer malevolence caused Jenber's Congressman, Mike Pence, to - how do I put this? - blow his friggin' stack:

He revised and extended his remarks later on Fox:

We know why the White House is bent on returning to Clintonomic tax policy: as a downpayment on the V.A.T. and other ruinous confiscations to come, all with the same endgame of a catastrophic collapse that makes the Great Depression look like Bonfire of the Vanities.  Because there are only so many ways and so many times you can fool a free people into incrementally giving up their liberty for the chains of statist bondage.  To seal that "deal," they ultimately have to be backed into a corner, beaten down, and brought to their knees to where they have no other choice.

Pence does well to declare a bitter fight against this act of economic cruelty and menace.  After the GOP takes back Congress in November, let retroactively remedying that "omission" be their first act on the long road back, forcing The One to defend every last plank of his hated domestic communization blitzkrieg and make of himself an unreelectable pariah.

Won't be anything "unexpected" about that - if he can "withstand" it, that is.