GDP comes in unexpectedly low

Is this a sign of an upcoming recession?

Of course, even if we have a recession the Democrats and their legacy media will argue that it is not a recession. I don't even have to come up with a reason because we know that they will figure one out.

The "unexpected" slowing of the economy seems like an odd thing. Not odd because the economy is slowing (that seems fairly straight forward). But odd because once again the people tasked with predicting these things got it wrong.

Again.

It would be one thing if they didn't consistently get it wrong in the same direction. If we have a Republican administration then anything good is "unexpected". If we have a Democratic administration, then anything bad is "unexpected". Been that way for as long as I can remember.

But back to reality....

I think it has become fairly obvious that the job market is cooling. We read of layoffs in pretty much all sectors of the economy. We are hearing about retail businesses struggling, businesses closing, banks collapsing, and we are drowning in debt (as a country, as a business community, and as individuals). This is not rocket science. You can borrow your way out of a short term hole with a long term plan to pay it back. But you cannot borrow your way out of a short term hole along side a silly plan to continue to borrow long term. That catches up with you. The chickens are going to come home to roost as the saying goes.

But Democrats love to tax and spend. Only now it has become tax, borrow, and spend. A quick look at the CBO budget projects shows we are expecting that our budget deficits will be nearly 9 million over the next 5 years and over 20 trillion over the next 10 years. That is in no way sustainable, but who is actually going to do anything about it? This would take the entire GOP (including people like McConnell) to grow some testes and stand up for America. If they were "unified" against spending and decided to do the "right thing" instead of what they believe the short term politically prudent thing would be to do, then possibly we could put a dent in all of this.

This is where the debt ceiling fight comes into play. We need to come to agreements to lower these numbers. Because these numbers (9 trillion and 20 trillion) are simply the baselines. We all know that Democrats are going to want to "add" more spending to all of this. They simply exist as a political party to do so. No matter how they "suggest" they will pay for it, these numbers will not go down. They will only increase by smaller margins if they claim to be paying for them with new taxes, and the projections from new taxes are always overinflated from what we actually see. More to the point, there is actually a "limit" to how much you can tax someone and see any real return.

This is a dangerous time. Covid created a lot of problems. But one of the biggest might be the numbing of the public to the sorts of spending number we saw in response. When a few hundred billion used to be considered a huge stimulus, and the 1 trillion dollar Obama stimulus had previously set the record... it is crazy that we were throwing numbers like 2-3 trillion around as if they were normal average everyday spending packages.

People no longer blink when they hear a politician talk in terms of trillions of dollars. Let that sink in for a while.