Your daily newspaper and your favorite news websites have been dominated recently by news about guns and gun control. Since the awful shootings at the Sandy Hook elementary school, where a heavily armed lunatic murdered more than two dozen children and adults, our political leaders have been talking a lot about firearms and what we can do to prevent another horrible massacre.
In an odd way, the opportunity to talk about guns must be a kind of welcome relief for our politicians, because the gun control debate lets each party retreat to safe, time-honored positions that appeal to their bases. Democrats understand that most of their voters will support attempts to license gun owners, register all weapons, and restrict or even ban ownership of “assault weapons” or other firearms. Republicans, on the other hand, know that their supporters will cheer vigorous defenses of the Second Amendment right to keep and bear arms and stalwart opposition to overly zealous attempts to regulate gun ownership.
I suspect that all of the talk, talk, talk about guns is, in part, a means of distracting voters from other pressing issues. Members of Congress and the Obama Administration would rather stay snugly in their gun debate comfort zones than deal with the spending, tax, and budget deficit issues that have far more long-term significance for our country. With all the talk about guns, how much discussion of those core economic issues have you heard recently? When those issues are in the forefront, and feet are being held to the fire, there are no easy, pat answers and no rote appeals to political bases.
As terrible as the Sandy Hook shootings were, we shouldn’t let our political leaders divert our attention from the federal debt time bomb and other issues that are restraining our economy. Yesterday we received an unpleasant reminder of these problems when it was announced that gross domestic product dropped in the fourth quarter of last year. Imagine: our economy actually shrank during the hottest shopping season of the year. It’s time we remind Congress and the President of the paramount need to focus on the hard budget and economic issues, before our economy plunges into another recession.
Whether you agree with that sentiment or not — and I don’t agree with it — I think that viewpoint, by itself, represents a kind of sea change for Americans. We always want things to be bigger, faster, cheaper, better. We don’t settle. We expect our sports teams to win and call for the coach’s head if they don’t. We celebrate victors and shun losers. If Americans are buying Bill Clinton’s argument, that says something about our country, and I think it says something sad.
President Obama had better hope voters don’t ask themselves that question this year, because new economic data analyzed by former Census Department statisticians at the Sentier Research firm reveals that
We remember our parents encouraging us to find work for the summer. We remember applying for positions and getting hired. We remember our bosses and co-workers, and getting our first paychecks, and how good it felt to have some extra money in our pockets.
The standard economic measurements of recovery from a recession tell a uniformly ugly story. Economic growth after a recession has never been weaker. Unemployment, which currently stands at 8.3 percent, has never before been so high three years after a recession’s end. Consumer spending has never been so paltry. And only once has job growth been slower than it is now.
These figures are often revised, and perhaps this announcement will be modified in the future. And 1.5 percent growth is better than flat-lining, or actual economic contraction, but that’s about the extent of the positive things you can say about this news. Such economic growth is measly by any measure. It’s not enough expansion to create real employment opportunities for the new people entering the job market — good luck finding work if you are someone who graduated from college this year — and it basically means that the economy is in a stall. We’ll just have to hope that the stall ends with upward movement, and not a nose dive into new, double-dip recessionary territory.
I’m skeptical about efforts to measure consumer confidence in a country as large and diverse as America. I wasn’t consulted. Were any of our readers? (How about a show of hands?) And the only surprising thing, really, is that economic experts would be surprised about their inability to forecast something as unpredictable as consumer sentiment. Economists are almost always wrong in their predictions. Why do you think Thomas Carlyle called economics “the dismal science”? The weather forecast on my iPhone AccuWeather forecast is far more reliable than the musings of out-of-touch economists.
As I’ve mentioned before, 
According to the 
That’s right: a big, fat zero. Nada. Zilch. A goose egg. Naught. Zippo. What could be a more apt and powerful description for the moribund state of our economy? Neither up nor down. Dead in the water and becalmed. Not really doing anything. It’s the first time since 1945, 66 years ago, that the government reported a net job change of zero.
My grandmother told me, however, that I should always look on the bright side. I’ve tried to do that about the current sad state of the American economy, and have come up with the following possible silver linings:
Of course, it is impossible to fully ignore the news, which is discouraging. The 
The wealth in Congress knows no party-line boundaries; Republicans and Democrats alike are doing well. According to the reports, the 
