If you’re looking for signs that the administration’s economic efforts are starting to pay off, there’s at least one segment of the economy that President Obama himself has personally stimulated. It even made it to feature story status on “60 Minutes.”
Our new President has boosted sales of guns and ammo by 300 percent. That long, long line of waiting people snaking all the way around the building and out into the street isn’t for some Depression soup kitchen; it’s at a gun show.
Of course, “60 Minutes” used it to suggest we need more laws, more fingerprinting and background checks and waiting periods even for transfer of one gun from one individual to another, and fto spout the usual banalities about the need to outlaw assault weapons. Even liberal Senator Diane Feinstein was chastised for her lack of political courage, making her whine about the National Rifle Association “having a stranglehold on Congress.” (I thought the Dems had a majority in both Houses.)
CBS missed the more interesting storyline, though. The nationwide stockpiling of guns and ammo as symbol of what Obama has wrought in such a short time, his chief and arguably only accomplishment.
Panic. Fear. Terror. No president has ever created so much of them.
The markets are bone dry of private capital thanks to the fear he has created, the worry over what’s next – what new law or interference or takeover of an industry he and his minions will propose or enact. In Florida, real estate is being offered at dime-on-the-dollar bargain prices, and it languishes with investors sitting on the sidelines, their money in shoe-boxes. Were it not for Obama threatening to tax investors blue, limit their ability to foreclose on non-paying buyers and massively interfere with real estate markets, these bargains would be irresistible and a buying spree underway.
The dread cuts across the economy. High quality, brand name, rock solid American corporations’ stock is now offered at 30 percent, 40 percent, even 50 percent discount with few takers. Small and mid-sized businesses: printing companies, auto repair shops, even veterinary practices are merging, each dumping half their employees as they keep only their best. They’re motivated by horrors they anticipate, not reality arrived.
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