What is Retarding the U.S. Economic Recovery

Joseph Salerno today nicely sums up (some of) the main reasons the U.S. economic recovery is retarded,

...what is retarding the economic recovery is not the Federal budget deficit or the size of the national debt per se. It is rather the amount of resources that the Federal government is prying from the hands of productive entrepreneurs, investors and laborers, and siphoning out of the private economy into wasteful subsidies to domestic special interests, the financing of unnecessary wars, the feeding of an insatiable and gigantic military machine, and the payment of the salaries of the unproductive politicians and bureaucrats who oversee it all. This is the true burden dragging down the economy and is measured by precisely total government spending... 

Many of these free market distortions are holding back any economic improvement in the euro area as well.

Read the full article here.