You can't begin a recovery in denial.

Steve Soto cites reports that blame gas prices for a big dip in consumer confidence, and that's a part of it, without doubt, but with durable goods down, the housing market diving and a continuing multi-million job deficit, the heralded economic recovery seems pretty illusionary to me.

In fact, Rasmussen's daily tracking on the economic conficence level fell to a six month low today, with 56% of Americans feeling things are getting worse. Even in the investment community, which has been the source for much of the recovery news, the split has 44% of investors seeing things going down, vs. 42% finding good news in the ecomomy.

The overall consumer scale is down as measured against one week, one month and three month benchmarks. Guess Bush is going to have to count on good news from the war front...heh.