Vacation Report: No Signs of Recovery in Phoenix

We took a little three day excursion to Phoenix late last week. We have always loved watching live NHL hockey and with back-to-back games scheduled in Phoenix we thought it would be a nice post-election diversion. Or put another way, when we have had (temporarily) our fill of politics we news junkies tend to explore our other preference and satisfy our sports junkie appetite. What we found in Phoenix were signs everywhere that the economic downturn is, at best, scraping along the bottom. The signs were unmistakable. For starters we were able to secure rooms at a very nice hotel on Priceline at OUR price. We have found that usually, when the economy is healthy, our relatively low offers for rooms are rejected we are forced to pay the hotel’s asking price. When we got to the arena in Glendale on the west side of Phoenix we were shocked to see all the Calgary fans that had made the trip down to Phoenix.

Coyotes on the "Power Play"

No doubt the province of Alberta has a different attitude towards developing natural resources including oil and gas than we have had here in New Mexico for the last eight years. And thank goodness for the Phoenix economy there were plenty of Canadians there to spend money. Still, when the game started on Friday night the arena was less than half full. We have never seen a smaller crowd on a Friday night. As frequent patrons of NHL hockey in Phoenix it was a bit shocking to see. The Coyotes made the playoffs last year for the first time in several years and the 2010-11 team shows equal promise.

When the St. Louis Blues and the Coyotes played the following evening the crowd was similarly disappointing if not even smaller. No doubt the Missouri economy is not humming along like the economy in Calgary. There were very few Blues fans visiting. All in all for us a good time was had. The Coyotes won both games and the games were very entertaining.

Washington D.C. "Power Play"

But as we moved out of the area Sunday morning I could not help but think that the last thing the NHL team in Phoenix needs is the implementation of Obama-Pelosi-Reed Tax Hikes in January. NHL tickets appeal to relatively high end consumers but the fans spend money at shops and restaurants outside of the arenas. Higher end consumers in Phoenix are still showing severe signs of wear and tear in an economy sporting a 9.6% unemployment rate. Apparently the "stimulus" didn't do Arizona much good either. And by the way, we are no longer going to use the term "Bush Tax Cuts" to describe the current debate. Whether or not the delicate geniuses in Washington are going to reach into our pockets now that they have borrowed and blown for two years has nothing to do with the reset of tax rates that propelled the U.S. economy out of the Clinton/dot.com bust/9-11 attacks recession. That was then and the tax hikes looming are "now."

Vacation Report: No Signs of Recovery in Phoenix