Via the Instapundit (muchas gracias!), a contrarian article about wages and productivity -- and the current reporting thereof.

Well worth reading in its entirety, but here's a few of my favorite parts:

The new angle is that wages (which are stagnant) are no longer connected to productivity (which continues to rise), and reporters are only too happy to explicitly point out that you ought to be very depressed about that (and then they remind you of how unhappy people are with Bush's economy).

What no reporter seems to realize is that the economic trends they hysterically lament today are historically typical, except for the aberrant dot-com bubble era that ran from 1997 to 2001. ...

The "stagnant wage" phenomenon is not new, it is not a huge puzzle, and it's not a reason to suddenly hate our fabulous economy. Do you really believe that from 1973 to 1997 only the wealthy became better off because only their hourly wages increased? That's what you have to believe if you reason like the New York Times and the BBC....

As you can see (speaking like a New York Times reporter for a moment), the American dream ended a very long time ago. We just decided to get really depressed about it now that Bush is in office.

I noticed a long time ago that the homeless apparently disappear when Democrats are elected to office. I guess there's an economic equivalent to that phenomenon.