Against All Odds

Lawrence Kudlow has a good article up over at The Washington Times' web site. He calls it "Bush's Very Good Year." We have commented on this recently on this blog, but I think it bears repeating, because remember how he was being written off after the 2006 election? Why, the Democrats were going to run all over him, then run him out of office. In reality, he has been smacking them upside the head over and over again.

Against all odds, and despite the usual drumbeat of criticism, President Bush had a very good year.

The troop surge in Iraq is succeeding. America remains safe from terrorist attacks. And the Goldilocks economy is outperforming all expectations.

At his year-end news conference, Mr. Bush said with optimism that the economy is fundamentally sound, despite the housing downturn and the subprime credit crunch. The very next day, that optimism was reinforced with news of the best consumer spending in two years.

The prophets of recessionary doom, such as former Fed Chairman Alan Greenspan, Republican adviser Martin Feldstein, ex-Democratic Treasury Secretary Lawrence Summers, and bond-maven Bill Gross have been proven wrong once again.

Calendar year 2007 looks set to produce 3 percent growth in real gross domestic product, nearly 3 percent growth in consumer spending, and more than 3 percent growth in after-tax inflation-adjusted incomes.

Meanwhile, headline inflation (including food and energy) will have run at 2½ percent, with only 2 percent core inflation.

You get the idea. What I keep going back to are the gloom and doom reports of how Christmas season spending was going to be awful this year, and the "experts" were proven wrong again. I'm beginning to wonder how these experts ever got to be experts. Must have been an online 4 week economy course or something. Or maybe...Democrat hopes for bad times for America. That seems more likely.