bush confident economy is moving in right direction...but what is right?

[kaiser soze]

http://www.marketwatch.com/News/Story/Story.aspx?guid=%7BAB1AA6EE%2D6EEB%2D406E%2D9A0E%2 D69DF33408A82%7D&dist=newsfinder&symbol=&siteid=mktw

WASHINGTON (MarketWatch) -- The U.S. economy is headed in the right direction, President Bush said Friday, and and his economic team remains confident about the outlook. "The economy grew at a 4% annual rate in the first half of 2006. This means our economy is maintaining solid growth and performing in line with expectations," Bush said after a two-day closed-door meeting with his top economic advisers at Camp David.

and in other news...

Ford cuts production

http://www.breitbart.com/news/2006/08/18/D8JJ4L3G1.html

Disney cuts jobs

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/13832003/

Unemployment hits five month high

http://msnbc.msn.com/id/14183758/

Gas prices hit a new high

http://abcnews.go.com/Business/wireStory?id=2309355

What fucking country is bush living in again?

[yeahwho]

He is taking this que from Henry Paulson, the Treasury secretary. Henry paulson also acknowledged that economic inequality is rising in America.

But he quickly reverted to form, falsely implying that rising inequality is mainly a story about rising wages for the highly educated. And he argued that nothing can be done about this trend... History suggests otherwise. ...

From a recent NYTimes article:

Since the 1920’s there have been four eras of American inequality:

• The Great Compression, 1929-1947: The birth of middle-class America. The real wages of production workers ... rose 67 percent, while the real income of the richest 1 percent of Americans actually fell 17 percent.

• The Postwar Boom, 1947-1973: An era of widely shared growth. Real wages rose 81 percent, and the income of the richest 1 percent rose 38 percent.

• Stagflation, 1973-1980: Everyone lost ground. Real wages fell 3 percent, and the income of the richest 1 percent fell 4 percent.

• The New Gilded Age, 1980-?: ...Between 1980 and 2004, real wages in manufacturing fell 1 percent, while the real income of the richest 1 percent ... rose 135 percent.

So to get an idea of what direction things are going in GW's world we can take a scan of the past 80 years.

[Documad]

Ah, I had a thought tonight when I saw my third sign about a house that's being sold at auction against the will of its owners. I was suddenly back in the mid 1980s when farm foreclosures were on our local news all the time and that Jessica Lange/Sam Shepherd movie came out: "no sale no sale no sale." Last week when I was door knocking in a middle class neighborhood, I ran into a family being evicted from a rental house. I'm so strongly reminded of the Reagan/Bush I era, that I expect to start seeing boarded up crack houses again.

I wish I had some extra money so that at least I could take advantage of the misery of others.