Economy Keeps Rocking!

A new high in the stock market today:

U.S. stocks rose on Friday as energy shares rebounded with oil prices, and government data showed retail sales rose more-than-expected last month, underscoring a more robust economic outlook.
The Dow Jones industrial average made its 24th record close since October.

And the overall economic health of the nation continues to get stronger:

The federal deficit has improved significantly in the first three months of the new budget year, helped by a continued surge in tax revenues.

In its monthly budget report, the Treasury Department said Friday that the deficit from October through December totaled $80.4 billion, the smallest imbalance for the first three months of a budget year since The budget year ends Sept. 30.

Tax collections are running 8.2 percent higher than a year ago while government spending is up by just 0.7 percent from a year ago. Last year's spending totals were boosted by significant payments to help the victims of the Gulf Coast hurricanes.

The Treasury said for December, the government actually ran a surplus of $44.5 billion, the largest surplus ever recorded in December and a gain that reflected a big jump in quarterly corporate tax payments.

And more jobs are being created, at higher wages (buried in last week's Washington Post, on Page D6 - would the President have been a Clinton, could we expect to see these type of stories on page one again?):

Employers hired new workers and boosted wages at a brisk clip last month, creating far more jobs than many economists had expected and causing unemployment to hold steady at a low 4.5 percent, the Labor Department said yesterday.
That report followed others this week showing that retailers rang up decent holiday sales last month, while factories churned out more goods and businesses spent more on offices, shopping centers and other types of commercial construction.

Points to ponder:

- how many other nations in the world could survive a catastrophic attack on its largest city, and the destruction of another key port city via natural causes (or was it Karl Rove's racist weather machine?), and emerge stronger? Wow, we are a great nation! USA! USA!

-notice how the amazing resiliant Bush economy gets virtually no press? Good for Bush = Bad for the Democrats = Good for America. The media only views the good economy through the distorted lens of it somehow being bad news for the new Democratic majority, so they do not report it. The truth is secondary to an agenda, just like in Iraq. Nice.

-and why do the Democrats feel they need to rework the economic system, when it is so obviously functioning so smoothly? If corporate tax reciepts are closing the federal budget gap, isn't the Democrat's dream of big business "footing the bill" actually being realized? If tax cuts have allowed businesses to reinvest in their facilities, expanding growth and job creation, do we really need to raise corporate taxes to fund government-run jobs programs?
Why turn the system upside down? Because you can? Because everything Bush has ever gazed upon is now sullied, and thus must be burned to the ground?

Gateway Pundit has more questions on where the Democrats think they can go with their "new direction"...

The best thing the government can ever do within the private sector is...get out of the way!