By Rick Manning – There is a new phrase that is being bandied about in these hard economic times that should be frightening to anyone who believes that America’s rightful place in the world is on top of the economic pecking order – the “New Normal.”
Surprisingly, it is very difficult to find a definition of this economic description as virtually every article that mentions it is seeking to find how the “new normal” is impacting individuals and business as they adapt to it.
Given this difficulty, I thought I’d help these searchers for what the “new normal” looks like by going to the dictionary. Normal is defined as “usual” or in the second definition “healthy.” Obviously, new means “recently made” or “replacing existing one.”
So, those pushing the “new normal” economy in America are effectively telling America to get used to it. This economy is usual, healthy and it has replaced the existing one.
Effectively, those pushing the term “new normal” are through words attempting to get America to accept an economy where in July alone there are 374,000 fewer people in the workplace than in the month before.
They are trying to get Americans to accept an unemployment rate exceeding 9.1 percent as healthy and usual.
They are trying to get Americans to accept millions of energy jobs not created because the federal government policy is to promote supposed green jobs that don’t exist.
They are trying to get unemployed and underemployed Americans to accept their premise that our economy just cannot create jobs, and they should be happy living off government handouts provided by the lucky few who are allowed to slave away so they can be supported.
The “new normal” is exactly the change that Barack Obama envisioned in 2008, and it is the economy that he intends to continue giving America through his job choking regulators at the EPA, NLRB, Labor Department and Department of Interior.
The “new normal” is exactly the change that Obama, Reid and Pelosi envisioned and delivered when they bankrupted the nation by going on a spending spree that added trillions of dollars to the national debt and put automatic spending in place that is irreversible in a divided Congress, and cost our nation our AAA bond rating for the first time in history.
The “new normal” is what they intended when they took over the nation’s health care system and put automatic implementation language in place to ensure that hundreds of billions of dollars will be spent to implement a plan that the public neither wants, nor needs. A plan that a divided Congress cannot rip out by its roots even though the House of Representatives has voted to do just that.
This is the “new normal.” An economy that is growing at less than 1 percent, while economic forecasters from the White House make revenue projections based upon an assumed growth rate of 3 percent.
The new normal is a government directed economy that prevents job creation by forcing someone who wants to extract valuable minerals from the earth in Alaska to spend just under $150 million in environmental impact statements to dig in an area that is designated by the Alaskan government to be mined. A mine that still is awaiting federal government approvals even after the massive expenditures proved negligible impact.
The “new normal” economy accepts the delay in building a pipeline to move oil from the Canadian oil sands north of Alberta through America that would created tens of thousands of new high paying jobs, because environmentalists don’t like the way the oil is taken out of the ground in Canada.
The “new normal” is for American taxpayers to send $2 billion to a Brazilian oil company that is bigger than ExxonMobil so they can drill off-shore of Rio de Janeiro, and then sell U.S. consumers the oil that their taxes paid to extract.
It is clear that those pushing this concept of the “new normal” economy are banking on the American public forgetting what is really normal.
In November of 1980, when Jimmy Carter was viewed as one of the worse presidents in history due to his economic failure, unemployment stood at 7.5 percent, and it was in the 6 percent range for most of his presidency.
Over the two decades from January 1990 to January 2009, the average unemployment rate in January was 5.8 percent.
Now, two and a half years later, this President’s apologists want America to accept a “new normal” of more than 9 percent unemployment?
The truth is that the term the “new normal” is nothing more than an attempt to get American voters to accept the failure of the Obama Administration’s policies.
If they are able to convince America that $1.6 trillion deficits are necessary to maintain the “new normal”, then they will convince America to re-elect them to maintain the current “best you can hope for” economy.
Political apologists of the same ilk who derided the 4.6 percent unemployment rate economy during the Bush Administration for only producing “hamburger flipper jobs,” now seek to convince America that a rate twice that amount just needs to be accepted as normal.
To be clear, there is nothing normal about an unemployment rate that hovers between 8.8 and 10 percent of the American workforce.
There is nothing normal about more than 2 million people abandoning the workforce in the last twelve months alone.
There is nothing normal about people walking away from their homes because it no longer makes sense to pay the mortgage.
In the past two and a half years, we have experienced change to what is being sold as “normal.” Hopefully in November 2012, America will choose to return to the real normal, and the prosperity that our free enterprise system has produced throughout our nation’s history.
Because the one thing that is abundantly clear is that the “new normal” is the economic equivalent of New Coke, it might be new, but it is definitely not improved.
Rick Manning is the communications director of Americans for Limited Government. He can be followed on twitter @rmanning957.
