“Constant complaint is the poorest sort of pay for all the comforts we enjoy”

That was Benjamin Franklin, talking about the good old days of the 18th century where America’s GDP per capita was less than the poorest country on Earth today and life expectancy was around 40 years.

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Answer quickly: How much has GDP per capita grown during these 8 years of the Bush government?

Hmm, not bad for a country that went through a terrorist attack, 2 wars and at least 1 recession, no?

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The favorite topic now at the liberal media is how gas prices are basically destroying the country. Every single problem, from truckers to mortgage giants has to do with gasoline.

I do ask myself how people on Europe are surviving though. After all, gas prices there are now around 10$ a gallon and have been higher than what we pay now in the US at least for the last 10 years.

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I know I sound like a broken record but I think the press is probably the biggest player in this. I don’t know if this is orchestrated or not, but after Bush’s victory in 2004 watching the news became impossible.

Everything is negative, no matter what. When the house market was booming, they showed how young couples could not afford a house. Now that prices went down, they show the ‘huge’ foreclosure rates (around 1% of mortgages!). When oil goes up, the world is ending. When it goes down, the economy is crashing.

We hear about the ‘weak’ dollar but do we hear about the all time high exports? And how about VW building the first factory here since 1988 because it became cheaper to produce here than import from Germany?

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The worst part is that people end up believing in this. We have a 5.5% unemployment rate, stock market still around 11 thousand and people act like this is the great depression.

This increasing lack of perspective is one of the things that concern me the most here in the US. Maybe it is just a natural consequence of a rich population (who can afford to have people living without working out of other people’s trash) but still this is something that in my view could destroy this country.