So, How Is the U.S. Economy?

It's hard to know. If you confine your reading to, say, Rich Lowry of National Review and townhall.com fame, you'd say "superb." Here's why:

"The end of the year brought a barrage of good news that it will take Herculean determination to determinedly ignore."

"MasterCard reported that holiday sales increased 8.7 percent over last year. Sales of electronics were up 11 percent, and home furnishings were up 15 percent. Purchases exceeding $1,000 increased by 13 percent. The Wall Street Journal noted that economic pessimists harp about median incomes declining, but 'judging by these holiday sales, somebody must have money.'"

"Overall, consumer confidence rose in December to its highest levels since before Hurricane Katrina battered the Gulf Coast. The price of a gallon of gasoline declined to $2.18, down from $2.26 in November and well below the high of more than $3 in September. Weekly jobless claims are back to their pre-Katrina levels, and workers were earning 3.2 percent more than in November 2004."

"Then, there was all the news to ignore from the third quarter of '05: 4.3 percent GDP growth; 215,000 new payroll jobs in November; 4.5 million payroll jobs added since May 2003; fixed investment up 8.6 percent; industrial production up 0.7 percent from October to November."

There's more in there about kick-ass productivity and something about 2005 being the in the top five in economic terms for the past 25 years.

On the other hand, Holly Sklar thinks everything - or at least the things that matter - suck (yeah, it's from a site called The Smirking Chimp, but The Oregonian ran the same piece this morning):

"The hourly wages of average workers are 11 percent lower than they were back in 1973 (adjusted for inflation), despite rising worker productivity. CEO pay, by contrast, has skyrocketed -- up a median 30 percent in 2004 alone, in the Corporate Library survey of 2000 large companies."

"Median household income has fallen an unprecedented five years in a row. It would be even lower if not for increased household work hours. Americans work over 200 hours more a year on average than workers in other rich industrialized countries."

"We are breaking records we don't want to break. Record numbers of Americans have no health insurance. The share of national income going to wages and salaries is the lowest since 1929. Middle-class households are a medical crisis, an outsourced job, or a busted pension away from bankruptcy."

"The congressional majority voted the biggest cut in history to the student-loan program, at a time when college is more important, and more expensive, than ever. Public-college tuition has risen even faster than private tuition, jumping 54 percent over the last decade (adjusted for inflation)."

"Our shortsighted government, beholden to powerful campaign contributors and lobbyists, is cutting rungs from the ladders of upward mobility, while cutting taxes for the superwealthy."

Somewhere in those dueling collections of statistics, there's something pretty simple at play: what do we value? What do we want to see in our economy? For the supply-siders, it's all growth and productivity - the question of where the money goes and who's life it improves is either secondary or never mentioned. For folks like Sklar, it's a pretty utilitarian calculation: how many people benefit from the way we organize our economy?

If you go over to National Review Online, you'll read plenty about the "Bush boom." But what "boom" sees median household income falling for five straight years? Naturally, I'm closer to Sklar in thinking that not everything's peachy. In my mind, Sklar's income and insurance numbers trump Lowry's parade of evidence that Americans are buying - after all, we love our debt and can't stand to fall behind the Joneses (though there is the question of where he got that 3.2% increase between November 2004 and the time of writing). And growth and productivity: those are good things...but not unless one answers the question of what we're growing toward.