Jon,

Your post reminded me of the following message Wall Street Journal senior economics writer Steve Moore delivered during his recent appearance in Winston-Salem:

I tend to be very optimistic about the direction the country is in. In fact, I believe that right now we are in the midst of one of the greatest weatlh-creation booms in the history of the planet.

I thought I’d give you just a few statistics to sort of document what is going on with the economy because this is an incredibly powerful expansion that we’re facing right now. You’re not going to read that in the newspapers because the newspapers don’t want to record good news — especially if it’s good news about anything that George Bush has done.

But to just give you just some of the statistics about what’s happened in this expansion since it began I believe around the middle of 2003 — by the way, at exactly the time when the Bush tax cuts took effect. But if you look, for example, at what has happened with net wealth — and these are statistics that the Federal Reserve Board comes out with about every six months — if you look at the latest report they came out with, which was in April, what you find is that from May of 2003 through almost May of 2006, a three-year period, the increase in Americans’ net wealth over that period has been $13 trillion.

Now that is an unfathomably large number that is kind of hard to get your arms around. But to put that number in context, $13 trillion of wealth that has been created in the last three years is greater than the amount of wealth than most nations have created in their whole history of existence.