It is October and New Hampshire is full of haunted houses, haunted corn mazes and haunted hay rides. People are paying good money to escape from the real world for a little while and enjoy a good scare. That seems unnecessary this fall, when the real world is plenty scary all by itself.

Last month the United States suffered a terrorist attack that killed a U.S. ambassador and three others, and instead of reacting boldly, our President tried to cover up from the American people and the world that the perpetrators were al-Qaida affiliated terrorists. Iran, a nation run by terrorist-supporting zealots with apocalyptic dreams, is exploiting President Obama’s weakness to speed up its pursuit of a nuclear bomb.

The economic future looks as dark as a haunted corn maze at midnight. As Reuters put it on Sunday, “the world economy decelerates to its slowest growth since the global recession that started four years ago.”

Despite the small drop in the U.S. unemployment rate announced last Friday, economic prospects here remain bleak. The U.S. economy grew at only 1.3 percent in the April-June quarter, according to the U.S. Commerce Department, way down from the 2 percent growth in the previous quarter.

President Obama’s pledge to raise taxes and increase government spending, rather than ease up on taxing and spending to give the economy more room to breathe, promises continued lackluster growth for the next four years. And the President says he will deal with the fiscal cliff, which could push us back into recession, only after the election.

Our entitlement programs are driving us toward national insolvency, and the President does nothing, though he has acknowledged that reforms are needed. His own 2013 budget does nothing to reduce the national deficit or debt in the long run. In fact, it projects that by 2022 the national debt will rise from its current $16 trillion to a stunning $25 trillion. Having already put our children another $5 trillion in debt, he wants to add $9 trillion more on top of that.

As frightening as haunted hay rides are, they are nowhere near as scary as the idea of a second term for President Downgrade.