More good news than bad
Posted by Richard on July 7, 2008
The mainstream media have been relentlessly negative about America's economy (and life here in general) for the past five years. Now that there really are some problems, it's gotten worse. And I predict they'll become even more obsessed with doom and gloom as the election gets closer.
Case in point: Saturday's AP story, "America's unhappy birthday." I won't excerpt it or link to it, since they threaten to come after bloggers who quote them without paying a fee. But you may have seen it in your local paper or on one of the news aggregator sites. Doug Ross has excerpts here (I assume he's defying them, not paying up). The gist is that life in America sucks, almost everyone's miserable, and people are hoping someone will "ride to their rescue" (you can quote up to four words free, according to the AP fee schedule).
Well, cheer up! Sure, we've hit a bit of a rough patch recently, with the gas and food price increases and the mortgage mess (all of which are a consequence of liberal feel-good policies out of Washington). But so far, this century's really looking pretty good. Last Thursday, Mark J. Perry posted some evidence from Investor's Business Daily, leading off with another great graph (Perry does terrific charts and graphs) illustrating how much richer we've become:
… Americans' net worth — what they owned less what they owed — was $55.97 trillion. That's down from the peak of $58.196 trillion in the third quarter of 2007, but still $15.3 trillion above where it was seven years ago (see chart above).
Put another way, a bit more than one-quarter of all the wealth created in America in the 232 years since our founding was created in the last seven years.
I blame Bush.
There's more good news regarding incomes, jobs, the poor, lifespans… Read the whole thing.
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