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President Barak Obama delivers his State of the Union address to Congress, January 12, 2016.

“Anyone claiming that America’s economy is in decline is peddling fiction,” or at least that’s what President Obama would have Americans believe based on his remarks in his State of the Union address last week. Yes, according to the president, everything is awesome. And anyone who thinks otherwise is simply, to quote a Vice President from a few decades back, a nattering nabob of negativism.

But is everything as rosy as Obama would have us believe? The following points would suggest otherwise:

• The New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) just experienced the worst opening week in its history. During the first two weeks of trading in 2016, the market has declined by 4%.
  
• The Labor Force Participation Rate – this the total number of people who are either employed or actively looking for work divided by the total working age population – is at lows not seen in nearly 40 years, going back to a time when women were just entering the workforce in large numbers.
  
• The Baltic Dry Index – a shipping and trade index measuring the changes in the cost to transport raw materials by – is at record low levels and continuing to sink rapidly. These low and rapidly declining readings – the index has dropped 19% just since the first of the year – indicate a sharp drop in international shipping, implying a significant drop in international trade and a global economic slow-down. According to this article, the index has hit new record lows for the past nine days straight.
  
• According to FactCheck.org, the number of Food Stamp recipients grew by 45% for the period from 1/9/2009 – 1/9/2015.
  
• Breitbart reports that, “American’s middle class has shrunk by almost 20% since the 1970s and is now a minority of the population in the United States.”
  
• In connection with a shrinking middle class, income distribution has become significantly skewed toward the top of society. This video give a good breakdown of just how unequal incomes have become in the US. Among its findings: 40% of the wealth of the country is held by 1% of the population, those in the top 1% own 50% of value of the stock and bonds markets. Taken together with a shrinking middle class, it appears that the US is coming to resemble more a feudal society than the healthy middle class nation most of us grew up in.
  
• US federal government debt has exploded in recent years. When Obama entered office in January 2009, the debt stood at a frightening $10.6 trillion. According to estimates by the Congressional Budget Office, the debt was $18.1 trillion in January 2015 and is projected to grow to $19.1 trillion a year from now when Obama leaves office. To put it another way, it took the US 236 years to amass $10.6 trillion of debt, but by the time he leaves office next year, Obama will have presided over a near doubling of this amount. According to Boston University economist Laurence Kotlikoff, “Our country is broke. It’s not broke in 75 years of 50 years or 25 years or 10 years. It’s broke today.”
  

Considering only the bullet points above, it would appear that precarious is about the kindest word one could use to describe the economic condition of the US. To say we’re headed off an economic cliff likely would be closer to the mark.

So how did we get here? How did a nation founded by the Puritans and committed to the principles of civil and economic liberty end up a bloated, socialist over extended empire suffocating under the largest debt edifice in the history of mankind? Although a full answer to that question is beyond the scope of a single blog post, the short answer is that the American people have, to borrow what Isaiah said about the people of Judah, turned away backwards from God and from his law. We have rejected the truth and embraced the lie, and now the chickens are coming how to roost.

In this post, I would like to look specifically at three economic lies that are held by nearly all academic economists, politicians and their enablers in the media: central banking, fiat currency and Keynesian economics. Any one of these by itself is dangerous to the health of a nation. Taken together, they are a sort of perfect storm, guaranteed to bring economic destruction to any nation whose leaders embrace them.

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