NP: Taylor Hawkins and the Coattail Riders

As the GOP turns to the economy as something vaguely positive that they might be able to point to, I have to voice that same concern many other administration skeptics have. If the economy is doing so well, why does it not feel like it?

Of course, I'm doing that annoying thing where I'm not really speaking from personal experience here. Current job satisfaction notwithstanding, I'm doing okay on the employment front. As are most of my friends, and part of the collective shrug comes from the fact that I and many of my friends also lost jobs during the Bush reign, and had a tough time finding new ones. Besides, my current predicament is traced back to Eric and Sergey, not George W. As an aside, Kevin Drum recently asked what the next bubble is after housing deflates, and it very well could be the continued resurgence of Internet advertising, as Yahoo overhauls their platform, Microsoft continues to ramp up, and smaller players like A9 continue to develop their offerings. Maybe.

Anyway, that was quite a tangent. The one thing that always interests me in sussing out the alleged disconnect between economic metrics and the public's perception of the economy is the percentage of income going to health care. The more I think about it, the more I think this is a damning issue on two fronts, because I suspect that not only is the cost of health care going up, but it's eating up more and more of Americans' income. Some people like to cite declining wages as their indicator that things aren't as rosy as the White House claims, but if you add health care costs to that equation, again, my gut is that it becomes that much more powerful and harder to ignore.

That said, I haven't been able to find any stats on it, despite my chosen profession working alongside "the Google."