BizzyBlog has been on a real tear of late, providing genuine clarity into economic news and trends that the mainstream media is too --er-- busy to cover. Some recent highlights:
May 13, 2007 - How to Downplay Good Federal Budget News:
Perhaps you read this week that in April, the US Treasury reported all-time-record tax collections of $383.6 billion. If you did, you didn’t read it in the dead-trees version of the New York Times. The Old Grey Lady did not deem Thursday afternoon’s news “fit to print” on Friday (requires free registration), even choosing not to carry the related Associated Press report that is the main topic of this post (even though the Time posted it online Thursday evening). A Times search on “April treasury” (not in quotes) shows no evidence of any other coverage since then, nor does Sunday’s Business home page...  Readers would want to know what the old record for receipts was; it’s nowhere to be found. The old record was $331.8 billion in April 2001. If it ever happened, can you imagine a sports reporter covering the end of a mythical baseball player’s a 66-game hitting streak neglecting to tell readers that the old record was Joe Dimaggio’s 56? |
May 12, 2007 - This IBD Recitation Should Be Required Reading:
| No question: The year 2001 marked a major break for the economy, with one of the largest hits ever to the wealth of Americans. It could have been an epic disaster. But it wasn’t. Bush did exactly the right thing — though he’s still criticized for it today. To get the economy moving again, he pushed through tax cuts in 2001, 2002 and 2003. Some 113 million people got an average tax cut of $2,216. Families with children got even more — $2,864 on average.  Since the last round of cuts in 2003, we’ve had the quietest, and most significant, boom in wealth, income and profits in our history. This explains why the economy, to the surprise of economists and the chagrin of liberal pundits, keeps humming. We’ve gone over the numbers before, but they bear repeating. Since 2002: • Real gross domestic product has soared $1.64 trillion, or 16.5%, during a five-year stretch that has yet to see a downturn and that has witnessed average annual growth of 3%. • Disposable personal income — what’s left after taxes — has jumped $2.16 trillion, or 29%, to $9.68 trillion. • Productivity, the fuel for future standards of living, has improved 14.3%. • Overall employee compensation has expanded 4% a year. • Net wealth, the amount people would have after paying off their debts, has swelled $15.2 trillion, or 38%, to $55.6 trillion. That gain in just five years is more than the total wealth amassed in the first 210 years of America’s existence — an unprecedented surge. • About 69% of Americans now own their homes, an all-time high. • The jobless rate, now at 4.4%, remains below its 40-year average. Since August 2003, 7.8 million new jobs have been created. • Tax receipts have surged 43%, or $757.6 billion, again thanks to economic growth. |
Be sure and visit BizzyBlog. That is, if you can handle the stories that the New York Times doesn't have the energy to cover.
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