There’s an interesting contrast of opinions on the health of our economy between the most recent post by Stirling Newberry, chief economist at Langner and Company, and our own BizzyBlog.

These paragraphs seem to sum up of Newberry’s perspective nicely:

What looking at real economic statistics says is that the US has been hovering above recession for over a year now. What is propping up the economy is a huge binge of spending - both war time spending such as the Iraq war and its associated costs, tax reductions that pump money into the economy, and huge pork bills like the transportation bill, the agriculture bill, the perscription drug benefit and the new energy bil.

In short, Bush is attempting to take America down the same road that Japan took in the wake of their 1987 crash: build a bubble in housing prices to keep the ruling party in power, and then use huge public spending injections, and geographic gerrymandering, to prevent the economy from completely meltingdown. (read more…)


Personally, the numbers that speak greatest to me are the parts of the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics reports that talk about Ohio. I’ve never seen anything in them to be happy about. Over the next few months I think that it would be good to offer some tools to graphically display the numbers for Ohio.

One advantage to being in a flatlining economy such as Ohio’s is that if there is a bust we will have much shorter distances to fall than more prospering regions in the country.

(via DKos with discussion)