Don't ask the experts.

• Author: Hightower, Jim
• Position: The Lowdown - Column

They say you should never ask a barber if you need a haircut. Likewise, never ask the geniuses in charge of our economy if things are going well, for they are always waving the pom-poms of economic cheerfulness.

Take last spring, when the establishment media first began to notice that something called the subprime mortgage industry seemed to be cratering. By year's end, the crash would bury the homeownership dreams of almost half a million Americans, but officials in Washington and on Wall Street kept assuring us they had this little hiccup under control.

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It is "largely contained," Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson said last March, using his most dismissive tone. A month later, a federal banking official reassured anxious investors that the signs of collapse were "mostly contained." Not to worry, echoed Bush's new Federal Reserve chairman, Ben Bernanke, the problem is "contained." Then in June, Stan O'Neal, CEO of Merrill Lynch, chimed in that the subprime glitch was "reasonably well contained"--a comforting thought that he offered just a few months before Merrill Lynch reported a $2 billion loss, mostly on these shaky mortgages, costing Stan his CEO-ship.

It's a strange world, isn't it? Media and political leaders who laugh at fortune tellers take pronouncements of these financial officials seriously. For example, Alan Blinder is an economic guru who is a policy confidant of such leading Democrats as the Clintons. Yet, he recently expressed bafflement at people's deep pessimism toward their families' economic future: "People are more sour about the economy than the data would seem to warrant," he mused.

Could someone buy this guy a clue? Yes, America has had a boom--but for whom? Macro stats showing growth in the Gross Domestic Product are nice, but the problem with such happy data is that people can't eat it, gas up their cars with it, or put it in the bank. For most folks, the gross number that matters is whether their income is keeping up with their outgo--and it isn't. For the past five years, while GDP has grown, real wages for the workaday majority have...