You've been doing that for about as long as Obama has been doing that. But the economy just shrank 2.9%, gas prices are high, inflation is hitting everything I buy, I haven't had a raise in years, and the percentage of people out of the workforce is the highest it's been in decades.
But you have graphs. You have figures. You have hard data.
Who should I believe? The official data? Or my lyin' eyes?
I’ve made a ton of money in equities and fixed income by looking at the data I cite so you can decided for yourself. Frankly I don’t really care if you choose to be ignorant. I’m trying to educate you. Your choice if you want to listen.
And spare me the Obama shill crap. That’s intellectually lazy. Unfortunately par for the course around here.
Heh, I remember W.T. arguing some time back that Census Bureau data is the next thing to the Word of God (my description of W.T.’s view), because it comes from career public service employees. Then the Census Bureau data scandal came along...
More to the point here, seriously, I have come to believe both “economic data sets” (W.T.’s data, and what the rest of us experience and / or see as we simply look around), are generally valid, each for it’s own part of a sort of parallel reality.
There are a couple ways of looking at it. One breaks the world down into what I’ll call “Economic Reality 1”, which is where most productive families, small businesses, etc., exist, and which (to most Freepers anyway) needs no explanation. “Economic Reality 2” is a much more complex, and sometimes even bizarre world where non-productive activities somehow become a big part of GDP, economic statistics are “managed” for political and other purposes (thanks, kabar, for your explanation regarding health care spending!), huge deficits can be kicked down the road “indefinitely”, and much money exists on computers... somewhere...
Another way to look at it has already been suggested by several posters: Essentially, “Economic Reality One” is the same as described above, and “Economic Reality Two” is the “Upper Class” economy, say, those in the top 5% income bracket (to which I assume W.T. belongs.) “#1” can pretty much stink, while “#2” is doing fine — well enough to make the overall numbers appear ok.
A key here is that I am not attempting to refute the idea of a “trickle down” economy where upper income earners do well, and thereby pick up the middle and lower classes. However, what is rarely discussed is that while “trickle down” can work well in certain economies (Reagan, 1980’s), it doesn’t work in MOST systems. This is a complex subject — here I’ll just give the above as my opinion, which one may or may not agree with. And, I’ll add that present circumstances and gov’t policies are not conducive to a successful trickle down economy.
Neither are current policies conducive to individuals from the lower classes succeeding and making it into the top 5%. Crony capitalism and other policies exist to strengthen the position of the upper class, at the expense of the middle. (”Bootstrap” success still occurs in the US, it is just much harder for most, than in the recent past. Of several quite successful entrepeneurs I know, even with all the experience they gained along the way, none of them thinks they could today pull off the sort of “up from virtually nothing” endeavor that they succeeeded so well in.) When the middle class sees itself slipping, with little hope of upward success, there is a BIG problem, regardless of what data W.T. may post.
But, back to my main point, in either way of thinking of it, “Reality Two” can almost be it’s own world, and one can be quite successful in it for quite some time, even though the overall system may not be sustainable in the long run, or though the overall system is fundamentally flawed or weak. A sort of crude analogy is the Court of the Emporer with no clothes: So long as the Court behaves as if nothing is amiss, and no one / nothing else intrudes, the Court will most likely function just fine.
Eventually though, something or someone WILL intrude.
“Almost” is not 100%. In the long run, in our system, as ever more wealth is drained from the middle, the overall system, both economic and political, becomes more unstable. If the drainage is gradual, the system may stagger along for a long time, but, sooner or later, a “bubble” collapses, or some outside jolt will occur, breaking down the security / isolation of Reality 2. “2”, indeed, may well collapse further than Reality 1, or it may simply be destroyed by members of Reality 1. Innumerable revolutions in history, such as the French Revolution, come to mind.