From National Review Online:

Here’s the truth about what has happened to the American economy over the last year:
Since the stock market bottom one year ago last Friday, the S&P 500 has grown $2.96 trillion in market value. Corporate earnings are now at an all-time record high. Gross domestic product has grown somewhere between 5 and 6 percent. Household wealth is at an all-time record high. Interest rates are the lowest in modern history. Inflation measured by the Consumer Price Index is non-existent. Jobs have grown between 122,000 (according to the Department of Labor's “establishment survey”) and 983,000 (according to the “household survey”), and the unemployment rate has fallen from 5.9 to 5.6 percent.

These impressive economic statistics are largely the result of growth policies enacted by the Bush administration.

The liberal response? Ignore all this good news and invent a jobs crisis. Convince Americans that they shouldn’t be fooled by the fact they have jobs. Say that the jobs they have are just temporary illusions. Let Americans know that at any moment their jobs will be "outsourced" to India.

If you want to be technical about it, the unemployment rate went from a high of 6.3 percent last June to the current 5.6 percent.

A few facts on outsourcing and productivity, from Business Week (boldface mine):

...the U.S. economy has changed dramatically in the past decade. One of the key differences is the intensity and the breadth of the pressures on business. But even more important, new technologies have emerged that have given companies the tools to meet the new imperatives of competition and cost-cutting. As innovation has brought ever-cheaper computing power and new ways to make use of it, capital has become increasingly cheap relative to labor. The returns on investment in new labor-saving, high-tech equipment have soared. Given that labor accounts for about two-thirds of the cost of making and selling products, greater labor productivity in today's global economy is tantamount to corporate survival. As a result, productivity is growing even faster now than in the late 1990s. And it's a real job killer this time: A one-percentage-point increase in annual productivity growth costs about 1.3 million jobs.

...Given a dearth of new jobs, why is the unemployment rate falling, from a peak of 6.3% last June to 5.6% in February? Chiefly, people are dropping out of the labor force, which has reduced the amount of job growth needed to push the jobless rate lower. The labor force participation rate -- the percentage of the working-age population that is either employed or seeking work -- has dropped to a level even lower than during the 1990-91 recession. However, almost all of the decline has occurred in the 16- to 24-year-old age group, while participation in the 25-and-older segment has held up.

...Which comes back to the vexing issue of outsourcing. No one doubts that it is having an impact -- though exactly how strong is hard to say since good numbers are unavailable. While some put the number higher, Forrester Research Inc. estimates that of the 2.7 million jobs lost in the last three years, only 300,000 have been from outsourcing.

Read the whole thing.

The hopes of the Democrats ride on being able to convince Americans that the economy sucks. It's entertaining to see some of the spinebreaking contortions that Democratic economists have to perform to make some of these statistics look bad. Had anyone here ever seen "discouraged workers" mentioned in connection to unemployment figures prior to this past year?