In case you haven't noticed, the economy is booming, but for whom is the boom booming? This from Fairness & Accuracy in Reporting:

As the New York Times put it (12/6/05), the economy “has improved in the past two years, though polls show that most people think it has gotten worse.” USA Today (12/5/05) had it that “despite positive economic numbers, polls show that many Americans believe the economy remains weak.” And the Los Angeles Times (12/6/05) referred matter-of-factly to economic “good news,” noting Bush’s concern that “voters give him little credit for the improving economy.”

Again and again, the majority of Americans’ understanding of their own economic situation was presented as somehow disconnected from reality, ascribed to “pessimism,” ignorance or irrationality. The Wall Street Journal (12/6/05), among others, suggested poll respondents’ negative assessments might be “spillover from concerns about the Iraq War,” as if the war rendered people incapable of noting whether or not they can pay their bills.

Conservative pundit George Will (ABC’s This Week, 12/4/05) blamed media coverage for the public’s failure to understand that “the economy is booming,” attributing this misapprehension to “Will’s two laws of economic journalism,” which mandate that “there’s no such thing as good news.” On Fox (Special Report, 12/2/05), Charles Krauthammer likewise cited the press, which “emphasizes the negative,” for the fact that the public didn’t appreciate the “incredible resilience of this economy,” which he called “a tribute to the tax cuts which kept our economy strong.”

Even the inclusion of significant countervailing data, like sluggish wage growth or escalating healthcare costs—data that demonstrate that Bush’s vision of an economic horizon “as bright as it’s been in a long time” (UPI, 12/2/05) is simply not the reality for most people—was insufficient to shift the story from one of essentially “good news.” The most outlets could manage was to say that such factors suggest “that recent gains in the economy do not apply across the board” (L.A. Times, 12/6/05), that many workers are not “fully participating in the economy’s gains” (Wall Street Journal, 12/6/05), or that “many economic benefits are not making their way to ordinary workers” (Washington Post, 12/6/05). But why these ordinary workers, representing the majority of households, should not be considered the arbiters of whether or not “the economy” is good is never explained.

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It's facetious, really. I love the Krauthammer quote. And why isn't the media doing a better job of brainwashing us into believing what the Beltway Courtier class wants us to believe. They just ain't doin' their job.

But maybe it has to do with having to pay the heat bill this winter, and how that was a budget breaker for lots of working Americans. Maybe it has to do with the big mortgage payments so homeowners are paying and how overstretched their credit is. Maybe it has to do with a feeling of the fragility of the jobs they hold wondering when the the next downsizing our wave our outsourcing will hit, so American businesses can talk about what strides they are making in productivity. Maybe it's the prevailing conventional wisdom that makes it ridiculous for them to expect any kind of significant salary improvements for that very reason.  Maybe it has to do with the sense of of an economy that is in itself up to its ears in debt and getting more an more into it as we burn billions every week in Iraq.  Maybe it's the sense of unease that you'd have to be living in a cave not to worry about the incompetence of our current leadership and the sense  that they have  more than two years to make things even worse.