As always, politics is money. Obama can be on television talking about whatever he wants to talk about, but the bottom line is that he needs to put money in the pockets of the people who need it- or at least make sure that they have enough in there to do what they need to do.

These days that means getting people out to the stores to spend money so that we can start expanding the businesses again, right? Jump starting the economy means promoting investment, and the only way investment works is if there is growth- and in order for there to be growth, people need to be spending money. Circular, for certain, and we need to start drawing a whole new circle.

On the same day that one of their headlines cries out that the U.S. economy pulls out of recession, Al Jazeera also publishes an article about the drop in consumer spending in the U.S. As it turns out, the fall in our GDP is less than expected as well- all, somehow, right on track: We are out of the recession, losing less and less on trade, and consumers are actually saving some of their, well, our, money.

Hmmm. Geithner may be happy about all of this- is this what it’s like to live within your means?
The decline isn’t massive- it’s 0.5%, but it comes after an adjusted 1.4% growth in August, something that everyone, especially Bernake, were quick to point to as torch bearing statistics in the struggle to get back to profitable.

But let’s take a step back, here: It’s October and we are about 18 or so months into a recession, or if we can’t call it that right now, then a good 2 years into some rough times that really aren’t dramatically better for anyone right now than they were last year, whether the economists still call it a recession or not. What we have coming up is the holidays- Thanksgiving and December both involve a lot of travel and gift-giving, right? So if I were a nation with practically 1 in every 10 people unemployed, I would expect my spending to dip a bit as well.

Does it normally dip in October? That would be a comparative statistic I would like to see. But we don’t know. What we do know is that people didn’t spend quite as much money this month as they did last- I will currently go on record as predicting that spending will increase in November and then again in December, and probably drop again in January.

That seems like a natural trend- will I see headlines excited about the next two months going up and how fantastic that is for the economy? Doubtful. What I will see, though is the press bemoaning how much lower the holiday shopping numbers and travel numbers are from years past- and they will be, make no doubt about it. But so what? If we are going to micro-track the numbers and call the economy shaky because of it, let’s stay consistent with which numbers we are even putting out there to make judgments on.