Economy Made Few Gains in Bush Years

or
Unless You Owned Exxon or Haliburton Stock

The Washington Post puts numbers to what everybody already knows.

President Bush has presided over the weakest eight-year span for the U.S. economy in decades, according to an analysis of key data, and economists across the ideological spectrum increasingly view his two terms as a time of little progress on the nation's thorniest fiscal challenges.

In the category of "Other than that, how was the play, Mrs. Lincoln?" a Bush economic adviser vainly looks for a silver lining anywhere.

"It does look like a great eight years, aside from the last quarter, unfortunately," Edward P. Lazear, chairman of Bush's Council of Economic Advisers, said in a recent interview. "In the long term, things look good."

Well, the Titanic was making great time right up to the iceberg. And didn't some economist once say that in the long term we're all dead?