Arse of Democracy

I just can't figure out why the economic indicators are so bad right now.

Or are they???

The liberal naysayers who look for any reason to denigrate America's progress tell us that housing construction declined last month:

The number of housing units on which builders began work plunged 13.1 percent in November from the previous month, the biggest monthly drop in nearly 11 years, according to the Commerce Department. [....] Housing starts plummeted in November to 1.771 million residential units at an annual rate, from 2.039 million in October, the Commerce Department said. It marked the biggest decline since January 1994 and pulled starts down to their lowest level since May 2003. Construction declined in all four U.S. regions. Starts were down for both single-family and multi-family projects. "Housing is leveling off," said Michael Carliner, another economist at the home builders' group. "It's not going to be able to drive the economy like it has."

But for those who put America first, we read this data a bit differently.

The economy continues to grow. We built 1.7 million new homes last month alone!

The America-haters also take aim at good old fashioned American jobs:

U.S. job growth slowed sharply last month, and many workers' incomes fell, as automakers, airlines and retailers trimmed their payrolls, reducing consumers' buying power just as the holiday season was beginning.


Employers added 112,000 jobs in November, the smallest gain in four months, and below the roughly 150,000 per month that economists think are needed to keep up with population growth, the Labor Department reported yesterday. The department also shaved 54,000 jobs off its previous estimates of October and September gains in non-farm payrolls. [....]

The labor report came a day after the nation's major retail chains reported disappointing results for November. Sales at stores open for more than a year rose just 1.7 percent last month, compared with a 3.7 percent gain in November 2003.

Oh come on. You make it sound like there's a crisis or something. Spinning into Bush world, we get some help from Don Evans godly commerce department.

The unemployment rate slipped to 5.4 percent from 5.5 percent, which the department called "about unchanged," noting that it has been at either of those two levels every month since July

Unchanged. See? Nothing happened. Its nothing.

The over-educated liberal intelligentsia has even created a word to represent the progress of the whole economy, just so that they can criticize something:

The productivity of America's workers grew at a 1.8 percent annual rate in the third quarter, the slowest pace in nearly two years, the government reported Tuesday.

Yeah? Take this.

The deceleration in this vital economic indicator, however, raised some hope that employers who have squeezed so much efficiencies out of their existing work forces may seek to boost hiring as a way to meet customer demand.

And also, how about if I tell you that the productivity of American workers grew at a 1.8 percent annual rate in the third quarter? It's only bad if you make it bad.

This goes for national defense as well as the economy. Take the missile defense shield:

Opponents of the Bush administration's Star Wars missile defense system jumped all over Wednesday's failed launch, saying the setback showed the administration was rushing to deploy the system without adequate testing.

Here is what actually happened.

Au contraire, said a spokesman for the Pentagon's Missile Defense Agency: The test was not a failure, it just was not completed. "We weren't able to complete the test that we had planned," Richard Lehner told the Los Angeles Times. "I definitely wouldn't categorize it as a setback of any kind. The test had been planned for a while so it's a disappointment for those of us who were working on it. We will isolate the anomaly and fix it."

So buck up America. Stop listening, and for the economy's Christmas' sake, go shopping.