“It was allllll a dream… it was alllllll a dream!”

That’s what Fafnir says our soldiers should say, as they leap backwards and get pulled into the sky by the cords on their backs so that they can be airlifted to aircraft carriers cleverly disguised as banana boats, allowing us finally to make our getaway from Iraq. Treasury Secretary John Snow has obviously been reading Fafblog, since he tries the very same approach to the nation’s economic problems. You might have thought that we had lost, oh, maybe around 821,000 jobs since Bush took office. You might have imagined that the changes in the rate of employment looked like this:

But suddenly, out of nowhere, John Snow appears, wiggling his fingers:

“Claims like the one that Bush will be the first president to end a term with fewer jobs than when he started are nothing more than “myths,” Snow claimed.”

Yes, that’s why we pay all those nice people in the Bureau of Labor Statistics all those hard-earned taxpayer dollars: for their finely-honed mythmaking skills. Just like we pay the CIA to make guesses.

Likewise, you might have thought that we had a surplus when George Bush took office. You might have checked the Congressional Budget Office’s table of historical data and seen, with your very own eyes, how the numbers in the second-to-last column of Table 1, marked “Surplus or Deficit: Total” turned positive in 1998, for the first time since 1962, only to turn negative again in 2002, the first year for which Bush had budget authority. Or you might have looked at the table I took from Brad DeLong and posted here. It looks a lot like a surplus. But looks can be deceiving, according to John Snow:

“Another particularly nasty myth, he said, is the idea that the Bush administration “squandered” a $5.4 trillion budget surplus.

The truth is, it never existed, Snow said.

That number was only a projection that quickly dried up after the economy absorbed a series of “body blows” that included the stock market meltdown of the late 1990s, a recession, the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, and corporate scandals like the Enron failure.”

And with that, he jumped backwards, furiously wiggling all ten of his fingers, and was pulled up into a waiting helicopter by the cord attached to his back. I rubbed my eyes, and there, standing over my bed, were Auntie Em and Uncle Cheney. “Auntie Em”, I said, “Uncle Cheney, I had the most horrible dream! And you were in it, and you … Some of it was beautiful but most of it was awful…”
“Don’t worry”, they said; “It was just a dream. And it’s over now.”