The Federal Gov't Is A Strangler Fig

Jack Kelly * To The Point News

Ever hear of the strangler fig?  It’s a parasitic tree in tropical forests that grows by wrapping its huge roots ever more tightly around a host tree until the host tree can’t grow anymore and dies (see the video below).  It’s what our government in Washington has become.

The slowest postwar economic recovery ever is stalling out. Real (inflation adjusted) median income for American households fell $2,627 during Barack Hussein Obama’s first term, according to a report released last week by the U.S. Bureau of Census.  The number of people with incomes below the poverty line rose by 6,667,000 — equivalent to the population of Massachusetts.

Our economic wounds are  nearly all the result of government policy.  The five worst offenders are:

1.  Obamacare.  It clobbers employment, as businesses in labor intensive industries shift workers from full to part time to avoid Obamacare mandates.  About 75% of the new jobs created in the first six months of 2013 were part time, the Labor Department says. The labor force participation rate is the lowest since 1978.

The practical effect of the average 41 % rise in health insurance premiums caused by Obamacare is to drain the middle class of discretionary income.  Americans will have a lot less to spend on new cars, clothes, family vacations.  The auto industry, retail stores, restaurants and resorts will take hits.  As their sales slump, more people will be laid off, increasing unemployment, and tax revenues will fall, widening budget deficits.

2.  Federal regulations.  The explosive growth of federal regulations of all types has imposed enormous costs.  The Code of Federal Regulations expanded from 19,335 pages in 1949 to 134,261 by 2005.  The additional regulations reduced economic growth by about two percentage points a year, economists John Dawson and John Seater calculated in a paper in June.  If regulations had remained at the 1949 level, the gross domestic product in 2011 would have been $53.9 trillion instead of $15.1 trillion, they estimate.

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