The Economy Isn’t as Bad as We Think
Things are a lot better in America than most Americans think. Or so argues Gregg Easterbrook in today's Wall Street Journal. I've written along similar lines myself. By any historic standards, the American economy is in pretty good shape and living standards are at an all-time high. So how to explain the sour mood? Over the last quarter-century, we've had low-inflation economic growth more than 90 percent of the time. That period covers the entire adult lifetime of the median-age voter. We've gotten so used to good times that we've forgotten what bad times are really like.
The one thing I'd disagree with Easterbrook on is his comments, obligatory in some quarters, that the war in Iraq is going badly. He ought to take a look at Charles Krauthammer's column today. I suspect that Easterbrook, like many who have opposed the Iraq war, has simply not been taking in the good news that has been widely presented by now by mainstream media.
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Reader Comments
Who are you kidding?
Don't kid yourself with any statistics. No president, whoever he is, is in control, God is. Have Americans lost sight of that?
Wow
this was prescient...
The Economy and Politics
At any given moment people are losing jobs, gaining jobs, losing money, making money. This never changes. So, of course you can make a case at almost any given time how badly the economy is doing. It always bad for someone at any given time. What irritates me is how easily we tend to oversstate how bad the economy is when a Republican is President no matter how much the economic numbers dispute this. Likewise, the media showed a strong sense of "restraint" when reporting on the economy during the end of Bill Clinton's last year. This in fact turned into a recession for a lot of reasons, but there is no disputing that President Bush's actions lead to a strong recovery. Now we have a year and a half after Democrats took control of Congress with no desire to make Bush's tax cuts permanent, the economy is once again on shakey ground. Not as bad as some people like to portray, but with a good possibility it will get worse due to Democratic inaction. I'm sorry, but economic stimulus checks sound good to the voters (yes, buy some more votes), but ultimately will fail. We would have been much better off making the Bush tax cuts permanent a year ago. But, of course that would have improved the economic outlook and made it even more obvious that Democrats have no clue on how to stimulate an economy. People can figure this out for themselves, but many will not.
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