The DOW has NOT set new records

The so-called economic recovery supposedly is shown by the Dow Jones Industrial Average hovering around the 16,000 mark, the highest ever. It’s just below that number as I write.

In fact, adjusted for inflation, the DJIA is the same as it was 12 years ago. As other numbers have indicated, such as median household income, there has been no economic progress for more than a decade, since the late Clinton-Gingrich years.

The economy has stagnated under the anti-free market policies of Republican President Bush, Democratic President Obama, the Republican and Democratic congresses of their years; and under the inflationary policies of Fed chairmen Greenspan and Bernanke, both Republicans.

Here’s the DJIA adjusted for inflation:

Notice, also, the strong growth from the Reagan tax cuts, which fully took effect in 1983, through the Clinton-Gingrich tax cuts of the late 1990s.

The country isn’t going to prosper again until: 1) The dollar is returned to stability, pegged to gold; with interest rates 2 percent above inflation (instead of 0 percent now). 2) Taxes are cut back to 1980s levels. 3) The hyper-regulations of the Bush-Obama years — Sarbanes-Oxley, Dodd-Frank, Obamacare — are repealed.

Freedom produces prosperity. Government expansion produces only stagnation.