>Eureka! So THIS is how they are priming the pump and making the
>economy look much better than its real miserable state?!
Gallup's been pointing out that there's a big disparity between rich people's perceptions of the U.S. economy's health (fairly rosy) and everyone else's (fairly gloomy). Since the big media are written and produced mainly by better-off people, they're in a fairly rosy mode.
>I was trying to figure out why the stock market has kept going up in
>value despite the absence of a constant stream of good news.
The rate of exploitation is up, so profits are up and wages and employment aren't. The stock market has been floating on actual profit performance and expectations for more of the same. But I think at least part of Wall Street worries that if the job market doesn't pick up, consumption's going to suffer and there could be political instability.
>So when does this all crash back to earth? Before November?
There's a chance it could. Voting expectations are formed in the spring, according to several poli sci articles I've read (and which were the inspiration for the LBO election model, which went awry on Gore - which is, of course, proof not that the model is bad but that the candidate was), based on the growth in real disposable income. Taxes are down, which boosts disposable income, but the skew is so upward that it's not going to have a big effect on most people. But if their wages are stagnant and job prospects suck, then moods will sour.
Doug