More people are working, the unemployment rate is below 5 percent, and the international trade deficit fell sharply as exports rose and imports dropped.
All this comes out just four days before Election Day, yet candidates have been talking more about personal problems than about economic issues that affect millions of voters.
Who knew that the politics of fear and animosity could so seriously overwhelm the more fundamental issues of how well Mr. and Mrs. Average American Family are coping?
Yet that's the picture that the candidates are ranting about, even as economic success reports continue to paint a good picture.
Payroll employment rose by 161,000 in October, the Labor Department reported today, as unemployment held at 4.9 percent. Separately, the Census Bureau said the trade deficit in September fell nearly 10 percent, to $26.4 billion, from $40.5 billion in August.
Moreover, the Federal Reserve Board held off any interest rate action at its Open Market Committee meeting the other day, deciding it would be better to wait for firmer signs of economic recovery, rather than take a chance on interfering with the moderately healthy growth.
Yet the politicians have not seized on this good news, and instead continue to attack each other on perceived and unproven allegations of criminal behavior on one side, and documented examples of sexual misbehavior and creative accounting on the other, to the extent of gaming the system and paying little or no income taxes for years.
Who's setting the priorities? It seems the politics of smear are more effective in attracting votes than the politics of progress.
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