I’m not a political animal; I just don’t roll that way. Besides, talking about politics generally upsets me, and that’s not where I want to be. I mean, despite the fact that we’ve been beaten down by this lackluster economy for the last several years, I believe that things are finally turning around—and it’s mainly been due to the efforts of savvy small business operators, not the folks in Washington. 

 

I just got back from sunny California where I attended The NBM Show in Long Beach, Calif. where I had a chance to see first-hand just how resilient our industry is. Seriously. Attendees are buying new products, building their skill sets and actively growing their businesses. The three-day show was bustling, and attendees seemed motivated and energized by all the new items on hand, including interesting new product rollouts by Mutoh (a process control system for its on-printer spectrophotometer), NuSign Supply (a digital signage software system for easy-to-implement digital menu boards), GCC (innovative LED-based backlight panels), AnaJet (high-speed inkjet garment printer), Hexis (color-shift and alligator textured wrap films), and many others. 

 

I was truly encouraged by the genuine excitement I saw on the show floor and by attendees who were taking advantage of the free hands-on educational opportunities provided by the 10 exhibitors participating in the show’s innovative Education Station program. Shop owners I spoke with at the show told me they are seeing a slow-but-steady increase in sales, and many are starting to hire (or re-hire) staff they lost when the recession was deepest. These are the kinds of businesses that are helping us get us back on track.

 

Okay, officially we are in a state of economic recovery, but it has been so slow and irregular that many feel (as I do) that what’s really going on is that we are starting to recover from the economic recovery. A lot of us who have been waiting for the economy to get back on its feet again are continually disappointed with sluggish growth and persistently high unemployment figures. And witnessing our divided and apparently paralyzed Congress unable to work together to take even the smallest effective steps toward a meaningful recovery hasn’t helped a bit.

 

Watching the national debt crisis unfold this summer was about the last straw for me. Personally, I believe that it was the highly visible intractability among some of our representatives in Washington, and their apparent willingness to take the country to the very brink of financial ruin rather than find a compromise solution, is what led Standard & Poor’s to downgrade the nation’s credit rating—a move that caused immediate panic on Wall Street and still has investors cautious.

 

No one ever seriously believed that Congress would let the deadline pass without raising the debt ceiling, but making the process into a game of political chicken—with so much at stake—is what I believe caused S&P to pull that fateful trigger. Of course blame for all of this will fall on the President’s shoulders. “Obamablame” seems to be the political strategy du-jour, but it fails utterly to address the problems at hand and further erodes the public’s already all-time low opinion of Congress. Ugh! Politics! I should know better. 

 

Okay, back to work.