Green Shoots via Daniel Gross

Here's an interesting bit from Daniel Gross's latest article on Slate. In this he argues that the recovery is underway and jobs are coming. He also excoriates both right and left for failing to either support recovery or believe in it:

For the right, it has become an article of faith that so long as Obama sits in the White House, the economy must remain weak. Having voted en masse against the stimulus package on the grounds that it can't work, the line from Republicans is that Obama is a socialist, job-killing, market-wrecking disaster. It follows, naturally, that his policies can spell only doom. On March 6, Michael Boskin, the Stanford professor and economic adviser to Bush the elder, wrote a Wall Street Journal op-ed entitled: "Obama's Radicalism is Killing the Dow." Since then, the Dow has rallied 57 percent. The party of Reagan is, in effect, rooting for economic rain. For the left, the pessimism stems from two sources. First, the bailouts were conceived in sin, because they provided unjust rewards to highly paid idiots who nearly destroyed the economy. More broadly, Obama has been too concerned with catering to discredited economic forces: Wall Street banks and Republicans. To get three Republican Senate votes for the stimulus bill, backers reduced its size by about $300 billion. And that, argued Nobel Laureate and columnist Paul Krugman, made it too small to be effective.

The whole article is interesting, but this bit was right on. The talking heads are generally out of synch with reality. The consistently get it wrong. But like Wall Street bankers, apparently there is no consequences for their ineptitude.