Bloomberg: Ignore 4.4% Unemployment, the Economy Stinks

The MSM's constant harping and dishonest portrayal of the economy has paid dividends...a "man on the street" poll done by Bloomberg/LATimes indicates that a solid majority of Americans foresee a recession within a year and disprove of George Bush's handling of the economy. I doubt the poll's results but it may well be true, in which case all it proves is that a majority of Americans are completely clueless and/or deluded about the health of the US economy. Check out this penetrating analysis from a professor at the Colorado School of Mines: ``We spend ridiculous amounts of money on the war and now we have issues with the subprime housing market." Ah yes, those seminal economic metrics, war spending and the subprime lending stability. Oddly, the article then proceeds to admit that a majority of people feel good about their own personal economic situation. The article even admits the well-known heuristic error that people make in ignoring their own personal satisfaction to arrive at a pessimistic view of the world at large. Then we are treated to a host of putative verities that the poll is supposed to validate, e.g. the tax cuts aren't helping the middle class, blacks are more pessimistic than whites, the subprime mortgage reckoning is the lenders' fault and the government should intervene to help poor people. There isn't an ounce of economic wisdom in this article and, for me, it recalls Winston Churchill's aphorism that the best argument against democracy is a five minute conversation with the average voter.