[dirtboy]

In fact, average salaries have gone **UP** in the last five years.

Averages can hide quite a few shifts. First of all, if there are a couple of million unemployed people who are no longer getting a salary, that doesn't show up on your averages radar. And salaries at the high end can increase significantly and still mask reductions in the middle and lower ranges. So, once again, you choose the fig leaf as your debating method of choice.

Just don't let such facts get in your way, right?!

Considering that you were claiming that this was just Bush restating a reporter's question, when a further review showed he answered it at length, means you don't care a whit about facts, nor about what millions of Americans are going through. Just as long as no one criticizes Bush, you don't care.

[Southack]

"Averages can hide quite a few shifts. First of all, if there are a couple of million unemployed people who are no longer getting a salary, that doesn't show up on your averages radar. And salaries at the high end can increase significantly and still mask reductions in the middle and lower ranges.

If I have a whole lot of people competing for a very few jobs, will **average** salaries go up or go down?

[Southack]

"Considering that you were claiming that this was just Bush restating a reporter's question, when a further review showed he answered it at length, means you don't care a whit about facts, nor about what millions of Americans are going through. Just as long as no one criticizes Bush, you don't care."

Taking pot shots at me isn't going to help your argument. Bush rephrased the reporter's question (that's what it means when someone repeats your question back to you prefaced by "In other words..."). The question had two different components to it. Bush answered one of those components.

Yet people have eagerly siezed upon Bush's answer and deliberately misconstrued the alleged context.

That's an easy tactic if your agenda is to make Bush look bad, but it hardly gets at the truth of the matter.

So what's your goal, to make Bush look bad even if you have to take his quotes out of context, or is your goal to find the truth?

[ninenot]

Then there's the Chicago Sun-Times piece (7/19) in which the writer, a banker and industrialist, states that REAL wages are less now than they were in 1947.

...and while anybody can get a raise of 3-4%, if the COL increases by same or more, that's a REAL wage decrease.

[Sabertooth]

(Who's that big cat I saw roaming around here again? I thought he went extinct...)