The Consequences of Brexit

Investor’s Business Daily posted an article yesterday about the results of the Brexit election. Media predictions claimed that if Britain exited the European Union, awful things would happen. Well, they were wrong.

The article reports the facts:

Sovereignty: It’s hard to remember, but in the run-up and immediate aftermath of Britain’s Brexit vote on June 23, the prophets of doom were everywhere. They predicted everything from an end to London as a financial capital to the meltdown of the British economy to a disaster for the U.S. Sorry, didn’t happen.

Yes, here in the U.S. the stock market sold off immediately after Brexit, just as the doom-and-gloomers predicted. But then something funny happened: The markets snapped smartly back, with the benchmark S&P 500 Index up almost 3% since the day of the vote.

As for Britain, the predicted disaster never occurred. As Britain’s Express wrote in a Wednesday headline: “Remainers were WRONG! Wages up and unemployment down as Brexit Britain booms”.

The article continues:

The online Express, citing new government data, reports that unemployment plunged 52,000 between April and June, leaving the unemployment rate at 4.9% — the lowest level since 2005. The total employment rate now stands at 74.5% of the population — the highest ever. Meanwhile, the number of unemployment claims dropped 8,600 in July — the month after the Brexit vote — to 768,600, the first decline since February.

Oh yes, and workers’ average earnings jumped 2.4% in the first six months of the year, showing that if businesses were worried about Brexit, it sure wasn’t showing in how much they were paying workers.

We need to remember that much of the fear was media-driven. We also need to remember that the voters in Great Britain were smart enough to ignore the media–even after the election when the media tried to find ways to invalidate the election results.

The article concludes:

Countries in the EU have lived with a demographic death spiral, out of control spending and debt, absurd regulations that enrich no one and a regional economy that, as hard as it may be to believe, grows even more slowly than ours. From 2008, the peak year of the financial crisis, through 2015, EU GDP grew 2%, according to U.S. government data. No, that’s not 2% a year — 2% total. It’s been an utter disaster, and the EU’s clueless bureaucrats seem helpless to do anything about it other than blaming their own citizens.

Britain saved itself from decades of stagnation and decline by Brexiting the EU. As such, Britain may have given the other troubled members of the EU the greatest gift of all — a way to leave the dysfunctional EU and rediscover their lost sovereignty and growth.

Let’s compare that to the current election cycle in America. The media has already declared Hillary Clinton the winner. She is up by a million points (it makes you wonder who they actually talk to). If the polls are accurate, how come Donald Trump draws overflow crowds and Hillary can’t fill someone’s living room? As we get closer to the election, the pollsters will rediscover some form of honesty and the polls will become more accurate, but right now they are like the Brexit polls–a total joke. Take heart, there are less than three months to go!