Saturday, August 27, 2005

Boston Globe Reports Economy Improving

It's official. The Globe has said it. The arguments in our house are over. Even my mother-in-law will now be forced to admit that economy is doing well. After all, it said this in the Boston Globe:

Boston Duck Tours, in many ways, illustrates why the US economy has managed to digest record energy prices and keep on chugging. While spiking gasoline prices undoubtedly add to costs of businesses and households, in the broader picture they have been offset by expanding employment, rising incomes, and still-low interest rates that have kept consumer spending strong, economists said.

Of course, it's still the Globe, so they go right into all the horrors that still possibly await us down the road.
If more employers share Brown's caution, job growth will slow. When costs rise, employers often prefer to pay employees overtime rather than absorb the additional expenses of new workers, such as taxes and benefits.

But the news is finally so good, even the Globe has to report more of it.
In the last year, noted James O'Sullivan, senior economist at UBS AG in Stamford, Conn., consumer spending on energy products and services rose about $70 billion; salaries and wages jumped $400 billion.

They still try to end it on a sour note, but as far as I'm concerned, this is the "in your face" moment. Bush's tax cuts didn't hurt the economy. They helped it.

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