Free Republic

President Barack Obama's new health-care legislation aims to raise $210 billion over 10 years to pay for the extensive new entitlements. How? By slapping a 3.8% "Medicare tax" on interest and rental income, dividends and capital gains of couples earning more than $250,000, or singles with more than $200,000. The president also hopes to raise $364 billion over 10 years from the same taxpayers by raising the top two tax rates to 36%-39.6% from 33%-35%, plus another $105 billion by raising the tax on dividends and capital gains to 20% from 15%, and another $500 billion by capping and phasing...

<p>Back in 1995, right in the middle of a nine-year economic boom, Louis Uchitelle co-authored an absurdly downbeat series of New York Times articles on "The Downsizing of America." That series was full of opinion polls, as though popular illusions could substitute for facts. More recently, there has been hope that scandals at the New York Times might have given new editors at least a casual interest in factual accuracy. Apparently not. A couple of weeks ago, the unrepentant Mr. Uchitelle wrote yet another weirdly apocalyptic piece claiming, that "manufacturing is slowly disappearing in the United States."</p>

In the '70s, the late Arthur Okun devised the "misery index" -- simply adding together the inflation rate and the unemployment rate. It still remains a handy device for summarizing the overall economic discomfort of American citizens. From 1970 to 1979, the misery index averaged 13.4 percent, ranging from a low of 8.8 percent in 1972 to a high of 17.6 percent in 1975. From 1980 to 1989, the misery index averaged 12.8 percent, but it fell dramatically from 20.6 percent in 1980 to 8.9 percent by 1986. From 1990 to 1999, the index maintained an average 8.8 percent, while...