THE IRAQIS GOT THEIR LIBERTYY AND ALL WE GOT WAS AN ECONOMIC BOOM:

Bull-Market Cheers for Bush (Lawrence Kudlow, 2/03/07, Real Clear Politics)

Real GDP for the fourth quarter of 2006 came in at 3.5 percent at an annual rate. Price inflation inside the report was very low, around 2 percent, with one major price gauge actually dropping its greatest amount in 52 years. For the whole of 2006, GDP advanced 3.4 percent. This followed increases of 3.2 percent in 2005, 3.4 percent in 2004 and 3.7 percent in 2003.

The latest jobs numbers tell the same story. The most accurate employment gauge, called "adjusted households" (which the Bureau of Labor Statistics created in order to combine the non-farm payroll survey with the civilian-employment household survey), shows nearly 3 million new jobs annually over the past three years -- all since Bush's supply-side tax cuts of 2003.

And the president (or anybody else) shouldn't fret about so-called wage stagnation, or inequality. Hourly earnings for non-supervisory wage earners averaged $16.76 in 2006, a near 20 percent gain from the last business-cycle peak in 2000 and a 64 percent increase from the $10.20 cycle peak in 1990.

Comparing the first five years of the Bush economic expansion with the first five years of the Papa Bush/Clinton cycle, average hourly earnings are 44 percent higher today in nominal terms and 9 percent higher in inflation-adjusted terms. Washington economist Alan Reynolds has written voluminously on the absence of wage inequality since the tax-reform bill of 1986. This is a faux issue.