Phil Gramm touched off a firestorm when he accused Americans of being in a "mental recession" (as opposed to an economic one), and complained we were becoming a "nation of whiners." Was he right?

Though the news media certainly browbeats us with tales of gloom and woe, the facts tend to show Americans are still doing quite well, despite the pressures from an imploding housing market and fluctuating fuel prices. While lazy journalists may be fond of writing repetitive articles about the myriad of ways in which people are scaling back their spending and making do with less, the average U.S. citizen isn't exactly living like an ancient monk bereft of worldly pleasures.

Economist W. Michael Cox and writer Richard Alm (both of the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas) have spent years tirelessly examining just how far Americans have come economically over the decades. Instead of merely looking at income, Cox and Alm examine consumption, which they consider the best measure of rising living standards. And living standards have certainly risen over the years, even for the poor. Consider homeownership. In the U.S., according to Cox and Alm, two in five poor households own their homes. In Germany, the average homeownership rate is about 40 percent, meaning a poor American has roughly the same chance of owning their home as the average German. A century ago, less than half of Americans owned their home. The average poor household today has quite a bit of stuff in it, too. For goods such as washing machines, dryers, dishwashers, refrigerators, stoves, microwaves, color televisions, and air-conditioners, ownership rates are higher among poor Americans in 2008 than they were among the general population in the early 1970s. A quarter of poor households today have computers. In 1984, census data shows that only about 8 percent of all U.S. homes had a computer. An article in Investor's Business Daily quoted economist Robert Rector of the Heritage Foundation, who noted in a study, "The typical poor American has more living space than the average individual living in Paris, London, Vienna, Athens, and other cities throughout Europe." The poor also have more money to spend than one might think. The federal government's Consumer Expenditure Study found that the average person with a pre-tax annual income of $17,462 -- the threshold to be qualified as "poor" -- consumed over $24,000 in goods. The extra spending power comes from the taxpayer, as the difference is made up by welfare and subsidies.

Despite these material improvements, the poor can still face great hardship, especially in the pockets of truly extreme poverty that sadly still exist in out country. But just as it would be dishonest to ignore the opportunities for further improvement, it is dishonest to ignore the tremendous gains in the lot of our struggling lower classes. Though their lifestyles are far from Rockefelleresque, daily life for the poor in 21st-century America is hardly Dickensian, either.

How about America as a whole? How are we doing? Cox and Alm asked that question in a recent article for The American, and the answer was... pretty well.

-GIR-

Brandon Bosworth is a freelance writer living in Hawaii

Click here to read "Nation Of Whiners - Part 1", and tune in to the next issue of Grassroot in Review for "Nation Of Whiners - Part 3"!