And when do you spend less? When you expect economic reverses in the near future, and/or past and current economic privations to continue:
U.S. retail sales unexpectedly stalled in July, pointing to some loss of momentum in the economy early in the third quarter.
What momentum? You actually have to be moving - forward - to have momentum.
The Commerce Department said on Wednesday retail sales, which had increased 0.2% in June, were held back by a second straight month of declines in receipts at auto dealers, as well as weak sales of furniture and electronics and appliances.
That June retail sales increase will, of course, be quietly adjusted. Downward.
July's reading was the weakest since January. Economists had forecast retail sales, which account for a third of consumer spending, increasing 0.2% last month.
Of course, they did. Because despite almost six years of metronomically consistent economic decline, "economists" somehow still get taken "unexpectedly" taken by surprise by each and every manifestation of it. It's more or less equal portions of brain-dead optimism, pathetically plaintive wishful thinking, and mortal terror of the Obama Regime and what it will do to them if they don't keep up the "happy days are here forever" party line.
Hasn't anybody bothered to wonder why the Fed still has its benchmark overnight interest rate at zero for almost six years? Has anybody stopped to ponder that that's had zero macroeconomic effect? And that maybe, just maybe, skyrocketing confiscatory taxation, strangling regulatory suffocation, and, well, metronomically consistent trillion dollar annual deficits and twelve-figure unfunded entitlement liabilities.
What Obamanomics has created is a two-tiered economy: the tier its phony economic statisticians measure, the politically well-connected, the one that gets all the media attention; and then there's the rest of us, screwed, betrayed, destroyed, forgotten, cut off from any and all opportunities, left to languish in dark, impoverished obscurity. The latter has disappeared down the totalitarian memory hole, beyond the propaganda event horizon, never to be seen or heard from again.
Speaking for myself, I'm better off than most of The Forgotten, because I managed my financial affairs in precisely the way Obamunists discourage: living within my means and saving for the proverbial rainy day. As I grew older, that rainy day fund became my retirement nest egg. That's what it should have been; unfortunately, I was involuntarily retired by a fat, comb-overed SOB, and the big-eared, chicken-legged, mom-jeaned divot-monger in the White House has made it effectively permanent.
There are those - some of whom I know first-hand - in vastly more dire straits than I. They are not out buying cars and furniture and electronics and appliances because they don't have the bleeping money for it. I am not because...well, I don't need upgrades of any of those things (at the current time, anyway), but also because I do not want to hasten the day of my own bankruptcy.
This sorry state of affairs can only be turned around by the complete roll-back of Obamanomics and a wholesale return to Reaganomics. Cut tax rates, scrap the corporate income tax, scrap ObamaCare, privatize the welfare/entitlement complex - in point of fact, reconstitutionalize the federal government, which would axe federal spending fourfold to about 5% of GDP. With tax rates at Reagan-era levels, the economy could once again boom, the federal government could run the necessary decades of surpluses to wipe out the debt, after which the Sixteenth Amendment could be repealed and the economy could explode to a level of global prosperity beyond human imagining.
Hey, if you're going to indulge a pipedream, don't do it in half-measures. But I'd settle for a return to Reaganomics. I had a career during that golden age (1982-2007). Now, I have no job, a bleak future, and no hope. I'll just starve a lot slower than my Tiermates.
"Hope and change," my ass.
-Hard Starboard Radio
-American Daily Review
-Constitution Radio
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