There were some dueling assessments of the economy yesterday as President Bush countered the claims by Sens. Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton that the economy was a mess.

The economy's certainly not as good as it was just a couple years ago, but it's also not in a recession (yet).

Obama mocked a more optimistic economic picture painted by Bush at a White House news conference just moments earlier: "People are struggling in the midst of an economy that George Bush says is not a recession but is experienced differently by folks on the ground."

Facts are stubborn things. The GDP grew in the 4th Quarter of 2007 -- the most recent for which we have data -- at 0.6 percent. That's pretty anemic growth, but it's still growth. A recession is defined as two or more consecutive quarters of negative growth (that's shrinkage to you and me).

That remark from Obama should probably be chalked up to political rhetoric, but it's interesting to see how Obama thinks economics works exactly.

"We are not standing on the brink of recession because of forces beyond our control," Obama told a town hall forum in Austin. "This was not an inevitable part of the business cycle. It was a failure of leadership in Washington — a Washington where George Bush hands out billions of tax cuts to the wealthiest few for eight long years, and John McCain promises to make those same tax cuts permanent, embracing the central principle of the Bush economic program."

So, the Bush tax cuts -- in the wake of a recession that Democrats denied was occuring approximately eight years ago -- were caused by giving tax cuts "to the wealthiest few"? These were the same tax cuts that removed hundreds of thousands of low-income people from the tax rolls altogether and made the income tax even more progressive than it was before.

So, Obama would raise taxes to kickstart the economy? That has worked when exactly?

The problems with the economy right now are the sub-prime mortgages and ever-increasing gas prices. The solution is not to raise taxes, no matter how much Obama would like to make it so.