Four Reasons Economic Pessimism is Overblown

Rich Karlgard spoke at Harvard, outlining 4 wrong reasons for pessimism about the US economy:

1. President Bush's unpopularity -- correlates with "we're in a recession" polling. [I'm not sure this is very significant, compared to the remaining three.]
2. Presidential election year -- it's always in the interests of the 'out' party to argue that the economy is tanking, so it gets a lot of media attention
3. Journalists are poorly informed about business and economic information, and therefore most media stories on business information are poorly written
4. Poor perspective on the numbers -- the amount written off for subprime mortgage loans so far is about $140 Billion, which is a typical amount of stocks gain/loss every trading hour on Wall Street, and about 1% of the US gross domestic product. Yes, it's a big number, but it is a very small part of a really big economy.

So you might be asking, are there things which do concern me about the economy? Sure! They include high tax rates, entitlement programs that promote government nanny-care instead of individual responsiblity, and high personal credit card debt rates. And I'm not keen on the growing trend of foreign sovereign national money being used to purchase large stakes in US corporations.