Good grief, what a nation of wimps we’ve become. Some bureaucrat tells The Associated Press the weather is to blame for the awful performance of the U.S. economy during the first quarter of 2014. Of course federal bureaucrats and politicians say that; it spares them the trouble of defending the effect their policies are having on the economy. But the AP didn’t even challenge the assertion.
Ask yourself: Was I more productive in January, February and March, or less productive? If you’re a snowplow operator or tow-truck driver, you’ll probably say you were more productive than usual. Me, with an office job? I was neither more nor less productive. On the few days the weather was bad enough to discourage me from going to work, I worked at home, with no substantial decline in productivity.
Late last year, a contractor started building condos near my house. He’s made amazing progress despite the weather. The crew that’s attempting to rebuild an Interstate 84 bridge in Newtown, meanwhile, is still slogging along. You’d think they were building a full-scale replica of the Brooklyn Bridge, using 19th-century technology, judging by the speed of their enterprise. (That bridge took 13 years to build.) They pretty much gave up during the winter, unlike the condo builders, who kept pushing through the bad weather.
Just to keep things in perspective vis a vis the economy, here’s the text of an email I got from the Job Creators Network responding to the AP/government report:
HEALTHY ECONOMIES DON’T BLAME THE WEATHERMANFrail GDP report is because of bad policy, not bad weather(DALLAS, TX) – The corporate chief executives of Job Creators Network said today’s fragile GDP report shows an economy full of businesses being battered by bad policy decisions. The nearly non-existent 0.1 percent annualized growth for the quarter under-performed many expectations by a full percentage point. While some blame the recent harsh winter, JCN’s leaders say a recovering economy would shake off winter blues.“Despite the immense devastation of Hurricane Katrina and another major storm in 2005, the GDP report with that rotten weather in it came in much stronger than expected,” said Staples founder and former CEO Tom Stemberg. “Good economic policy should trump bad weather, but that’s not what we have.”
The third-quarter GDP report for 2005 – called a “perfect GDP report” by some analysts – showed a very robust annualized growth of 4.3 percent, beating the U.S. Commerce Department’s expectations by half a percentage point. The historic destruction of Hurricane Katrina took place during the reporting period, as did category-3 Hurricane Rita, which smashed into the Gulf Coast just three weeks after Katrina, hitting Texas, close to the Louisiana border.
“Vibrant and thriving economies should be able to weather any storm. We simply do not have the right recipe for growing our economy and getting hard working Americans back to work,” said Alfredo Ortiz, president of JCN.
Ortiz, Stemberg and Slavic Group CEO John Slavic pointed to the overhang of regulations and taxes in the Affordable Care Act putting an ongoing damper on hiring. Additionally, a growing overall federal regulatory burden and recent calls for hikes to the minimum wage are further evidence Washington isn’t watching out for ways to let the economy grow.
“Whenever you look to our politicians, they’re looking at ways to raise the price of hiring and growing, and when you look to the economic data, we’re getting weaker growth and weak hiring,” said Slavic. “This isn’t a coincidence: It’s a perfect storm for killing prosperity, but it has nothing to do with the weather.”