In the last major announcement of an economic indicator before Tuesday's election, the BEA announced that GDP in the third quarter (July to September) grew at a healthy 3.7% annual rate. The 3.7% rate is modest uptick from the 3.3% growth rate of the second quarter. (Of course the media like to play the glass-is-half-empty game by saying the economy failed to meet expectations. Maybe the problem is with the #$%! expectations not the economic growth.)

The politics of the announcement is easy to predict--Bushies will view it positively and Kerry will mutter something about a jobless recovery. I come down on Bush's side here as suggested by the word "healthy" in the previous paragraph.

It'll never happen of course, but the contrarian in me thinks Bush should go around trumpeting the jobless recovery. Why? Because producing more goods and services while using the same or less labor inputs is a sign of an increasing standard of living. Taking less work time to make more stuff means that we can enjoy more leisure. Wouldn't it be great to have one's current paycheck but work fewer hours to earn it?

By the way, my use of the term jobless recovery in the previous paragraphs is not meant to endorse the Kerry view. I'm increasingly coming around to the notion that the abnormal period of labor market behavior is not the modest sluggishness of the Bush period (the unemployment rate didn't get above 6.3%) but the go-go Clinton era. Put differently, the current 5.4% seems more "normal" than the 3.8% rate of April 2000.