Here is some anecdotal evidence to the contrary. As I type this, the shopping malls all across America are absolutely slammed with shoppers. You can't even park near the place. This in spite of the fact that billions upon billions of dollars in goods are being ordered online. The past few days, I've seen large numbers of brown UPS trucks hurtling through my neighborhood, frantically delivering brown boxes from Amazon.com full of Kindles, tablets, flat screen TVs and whatnot.
Just try getting a table at a casual dining restaurant around here. Friday night, we went to Chilis, British Beer Company, Olive Garden, Outback, and even the Applebees (which I hate) and all of them were utterly slammed with an hour or more wait for a table. We went home to heat up a chicken pot pie.
Even the folks on welfare (and there are lots of them) are living high on the hog, buying shrimp, sirloin steak and geese with their food stamps and enjoying entire days of leisure in front of their big screen TVs, gameboys, Segas and what not while the remaining few of us slog off to work to pay for it all. If the economy is in trouble, I sure wish we could eliminate welfare because there sure are a lot of lazy layabouts that need a good swift kick in the butt.
Maybe the economy will still crash in 2013 but there are certainly no signs of it in the waning days of 2012.
Everyone livin' big, happy and carefree -- few signs of trouble ahead -- can't get a table at a fancy restaurant -- sounds like the 1920s. Permanent plateau of prosperity and a floor under the stock market. There was one guy warning it wouldn't last -- he was ridiculed and pilloried.
Gameboy and Sega are 8 bit systems. You may not have realized that since you slog off to work every day. The leisure parasite class probably mostly have one or more of: xbox, playstation or wii. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_console_controllers
50% of the free spending prosperity you saw at Christmas time is fueled by Federal Reserve funny money created out of thin air. So the masses (who elected Obama) can go enjoy it while they can. This is not real prosperity from creating real goods and services. These days China does not buy our debt. The Federal Reserve buys most of it. Each year it puts a trillion dollars of US debt on its balance sheets AKA blips on hard drives.
The Federal Reserve is a private bank. Mark Steyn today (subbing for Rush) called it a branch of Gov’t. Such ignorance is appalling for him. This economy is debt based and is highly dependent on being juiced by Federal Gov’t debt being bought up by the Federal Reserve which then pumps this new money into banks and the economy