Talking Down the Economy

“We’re all going to diiiiiiee!”… or so you would think if you have tuned into our socialist media, either the major papers, the cable news outfits or any the big three major newscasts over the past few months.

We have been bombarded with nothing but negative economic news stories, bordering on the hysterical. Stories like this one from the AP:

Home Foreclosure Rates Soar

LOS ANGELES — The number of U.S. homes that slipped into some stage of foreclosure in 2007 was 79 percent higher than in the previous year, a real-estate tracking company said Tuesday. Many homeowners started to fall behind on mortgage payments in the last three months, setting the stage for more foreclosures this year.

About 1.3 million homes received foreclosure-related warnings last year, up from 717,522 in 2006, Irvine-based RealtyTrac Inc. said. Foreclosure filings rose 75 percent from the previous year to 2.2 million.

More than 1 percent of all U.S. households were in some phase of the foreclosure process last year, up from about half a percent in 2006, RealtyTrac said.

Other headlines out at the same time were “Foreclosure Rates Sky Rocket!” Now if you were just the normal schlub out there that doesn’t pay too much attention to the details of the news stories you hear, you would think our economy was going to hell in a hand basket.

But if you just read a few paragraphs down the story, we find out that while mortgage foreclosures have indeed doubled, only 1% of total households are in some foreclosure process. This does not mean that all these homeowners will lose their homes… many will… but many won’t as they figure out a way to stave off the foreclosure process.

So the bottom line here is that over 99% of American household mortgages are just fine, and not in any type of foreclosure process! Once again, with just 10 months before a presidential election, it seems as if our socialist media is doing their level best to set the economic table for the Democrats. Then we have this report from CNN:

Poll find 3 out of 4 Americans see recession in ‘08

NEW YORK (CNNMoney.com) — More than three in four Americans believe the U.S. economy is already in a recession, or will be sometime in 2008. That’s according to a comprehensive poll commissioned this week by Fortune Magazine.

Only 19 percent of 1,000 Americans surveyed believe the nation will avoid a recession, while 57 percent believe that there will be a downturn this year. Another 19 percent believe the nation is already in a recession.

What’s worse for the economic outlook, just about half of those surveyed say that they’ve cut back their spending compared to last year. These results indicate a far gloomier outlook than economists anticipated.

“Those are pretty striking results, a pretty stark assessment,” said Dean Baker, who is the co-director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research, and one of the economists who believes that the nation may have slipped into a recession in December. He said that if Americans are this worried about the economy, it could cause an even sharper downturn than many economists expect. “[Consumer] consumption has been what’s holding up the economy,” Baker said. “I’ve been surprised by how well it has held up as the housing market plummeted. But it looks like we’re coming to the end of that.”

Even some economists who don’t think economic fundamentals justify the current talk of a recession worry that a change in consumer sentiment by itself could increase the risk of recession. “If consumers who were only worried [about a recession] actually pull back on their spending reigns, then it becomes a self-fulfilling prophesy,” said Rich Yamarone, director of economic research at Argus Research.

First of all, I would bet my house (that we financed with a 30 year fixed mortgage… back when driving a leased BMW with the money you saved by getting a cheap ARM was the cool thing to do) that 3 out of 4 Americans don’t even know what the technical definition of a recession is! A recession is defined as 2 consecutive quarters (that’s 6 months for you libs) of negative economic growth. We have yet to have one quarter of negative economic growth.

Secondly, all this talk of a recession by the media may have its intended effect of scaring the bejesus out of the American consumer, so they do stop spending.That is what the socialist media is gunning for right now… a terrible economy so one of their liberal presidential candidates wins in November.

The Bush administration is doing their best to try to blunt the incessant negativity, with some success. This from the New York Times:

White House Does Not See a Recession

WASHINGTON — The White House predicted on Monday that the economy would escape a recession and that unemployment would remain low this year, though it acknowledged that growth had already slowed.

“I don’t think we are in a recession right now, and we are not forecasting a recession,” said Edward P. Lazear, chairman of the White House Council of Economic Advisers. Presenting the White House’s annual report to Congress on the economy, Mr. Lazear acknowledged that the plunge in housing and mortgage markets had yet to hit bottom and that growth would be low in the first half of 2008.

But administration officials are counting on a lift this summer from the $168 billion economic stimulus package that Congress passed last week and from the Federal Reserve’s recent decisions to reduce short-term interest rates.

The administration’s forecast calls for the economy to expand 2.7 percent this year and for unemployment to remain at 4.9 percent.

That is much more optimistic than predictions by many analysts on Wall Street. Among economists surveyed by the Blue Chip Economic Forecast, a closely watched monthly survey, the consensus prediction is that the economy will expand 1.7 percent.

The Bush administration needs to keep the communication offensive going, and needs to start calling out the national media on their reckless reporting on the economy… their talking down of the economy… because it may very well turn out that their economic doom and gloom will turn out to be smoke and mirrors.

Republished from The Conservative Post.