Folks in the bottom half of the economy are already squeezed hard. They will be bloodied and bankrupt if economic policy inadvertently induces a recession.
Sentiment: NEGATIVE
After several trillion dollars of stimulation by the Obama Administration and the Fed, one might think the economy would be chugging along at a pretty good clip. But, it just isn't so, and the light at the end of the tunnel is pretty dim. Just ask a small business owner.
Unfortunately, in a recession, the people who suffer the most aren't the rich, but the wanna-be rich and the poor.
It's going to be difficult to stimulate the real economy in the U.S. at a faster rate than 2 percent and perhaps even less if we have that fiscal cliff in December or January 2013.
We're still in a recession. We're not gonna be out of it for a while, but we will get out.
If you repress rather than unlock the potential of large groups of Americans, what's that going to do to our economy? It's going to contract, not expand.
The entire economy, of course, is locked in a down cycle right now. Last time we weathered this was during another Bush presidency in '90. We were locked in it for a year and a half and everyone came out of it.
The economy has barely recovered from the so-called 'Great Recession', with a 2 percent annual rate of growth since mid-2009. Peak worker wages, business investment, and productivity all occurred around the year 2000.
The 2008 financial crisis and the Great Recession that followed have had devastating effects on the U.S. economy and millions of American lives. But the U.S. economy will emerge from its trauma stronger and widely restructured.
I personally believe that there's going to be a good case for the government preserving some type of guarantee to make sure that people have the ability to borrow to finance a house even in a very damaging recession. I think there's going to be a good case for that.
A recession is predominantly for the middle class. Where I come from, the majority of people have always lived in a recession.