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Aug. 30, 2006 The collective media is at it again, playing games with economic data in order to fulfill its need to convince the nation that we all are truly miserable and that "change is needed". The latest salvo from the leftists who control most of the broadcast and print media is that "real" incomes, the income we take home after factoring in inflation, is down under President Bush's leadership. We're all becoming more poor by the day, all except those who are becoming rich (who never seem to count to the media). The stories have been trumpeted this week in "USA Today," "The New York Times," "The Boston Globe," and I'm sure dozens of newspapers from coast to coast. Similar stories have appeared on all of the major broadcast networks. The headline in The Times boomed, "Real Wages Fail to Match A Rise In Productivity." Aside from the fallacy conveyed in this title, that somehow wages are supposed to change in lockstep with arbitrarily-measured productivity data, the article itself contained only part of the story. Naturally, as is usually the case with anti-Bush propaganda published by the overwhelmingly partisan Times, a good segment of the press picked up on this story an reiterated its points. The template that has been used, almost from the time President Bush was first elected, is that the economy is in the tank, and no amount of evidence to the contrary changes that template. When good news is reported, such as the favorable GDP growth which has continued for years, it is almost always tempered with warnings of a potential downfall to come. The press, it seems, feels obligated to warn us of pending doom, yet it showed no such tendency during the late 1990's bubble economy, when there truly was disaster on the horizon--even as the Chairman of the Federal Reserve, and ironically George W. Bush, warned of a possible collapse. In the recent Times article, it was stated that the hourly wage over the last three years has declined 2% after adjusting for inflation and that wages and salaries as a percentage of GDP are the lowest they've been since 1947. From this data all sorts of inferences are drawn and the intent is obvious, show that Bush and the other Republican leaders in charge have screwed it all up. The left wing stereotype of conservatives, which they have fairly successfully applied with the aid of the media, says that the rich get richer and the poor get poorer when Republicans are in charge (again, we have to forget about the fact that the disparity between rich and poor grew at one of the largest rates ever under Bill Clinton's regime). In its zest to prove this theory, the New York Times overlooked a key factor, which was correctly and justifiably pointed out by the Investor's Business Daily, a publication that actually uses reason and common sense--imagine that. The IBD editorial points out that the NYT used only wages in coming to its "analysis" (and I use the term loosely). The truth is that virtually all of us receive more than just wages as compensation; we receive wages plus some form of benefits. When wages and benefits are added together, this "total compensation" is actually up 8.7% since 2003 in real terms (after inflation). The editorial also properly pointed out that most of these benefits, unlike wages, are tax-free, so the workers come out even further ahead after the tax impact is included. So the message being conveyed by most of the mainstream press (and echoed by some less than knowledgeable UK contributors) that workers are falling behind under Bush is a complete misrepresentation. Real wages alone may be relatively flat in recent years; however, total compensation, the complete package that workers bring home to their families (i.e. health care, 401K match, vacations, etc.) is up significantly, as is the cost to the employers for these benefits. So companies are not raking in profits on the backs of poor workers as is so often represented by an overly socialistic press contingent. The truth is the economy has been doing just great under President Bush, even after 9/11 and Katrina--two events which could have easily crippled growth for an extended period of time. And the economic boom in no way is coming at the expense of the middle class or the "average Joe" worker. The media, through ignorance or sheer stubborn pride, absolutely refuses to give our president and his administration the slightest credit for anything going good while they've been in charge. This was evident from the onset of the Iraq War, when a huge issue was made of museum artifacts disappearing from a Baghdad museum just after Saddam Hussein's regime fell. In retrospect, we can see how ridiculous it was to make that story front page news across the country. Yet it was. And the media agenda is even more evident in its coverage of economic events. Bush is chastised for not doing enough to help New Orleans at the same time he is blasted for being too loose with the federal funds there--which has encouraged fraud. He's labeled a "cowboy" for "going it alone" in Iraq, while the same crowd pesters him to go it alone with Korea and other places. And this is not just Democrats throwing the stones; it is the bulk of the ostensibly nonpartisan press doing the damage. It's clear nothing Bush can or will do is enough to satisfy liberals who never liked him and never will. ------------ About the author: Ed Abraham is a concerned citizen living in flyover country, U.S.A., who happens to be truly disgusted by the loss of common sense in our society and is doing all he can to try to reinstall it. Email: eabra@myway.com Comment on this article here! ------------ All articles are EXCLUSIVE to Useless-Knowledge.com. Please link to this article rather than copying and pasting it onto your site (which would be unauthorized and illegal). |
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