Phill Gramm: a glass half-full kinda guy

(H/t to Sadly, No!)

Mortgage crisis got you down? Feeling blue about your 401k taking it in the chops? Phill Gramm's got some words for you:

“You’ve heard of mental depression; this is a mental recession,” he said, noting that growth has held up at about 1 percent despite all the publicity over losing jobs to India, China, illegal immigration, housing and credit problems and record oil prices. “We may have a recession; we haven’t had one yet.”

“We have sort of become a nation of whiners,”

You heard him.

Here's Bloomberg talking about some other factors besides 1% growth:

One in every 501 U.S. households either lost the home to foreclosure, received a default notice or was warned of a pending auction, RealtyTrac, an Irvine, California-based seller of default data, said today in a statement. Bank seizures rose 171 percent.

``The foreclosure problem is getting worse and will stay with us well into the next decade,'' Mark Zandi, chief economist for Moody's Economy.com in West Chester, Pennsylvania, said in an interview. ``The job market is eroding and homeowners have less equity. Lenders are much less willing to work with you if you've got negative equity, and you're more likely to give up your house if you're deeply underwater.''

In Nevada, one out of every 122 households is "in some stage of foreclosure, more than four times the national average."

It's probably all in their heads, though.

You'd hate to think what kind of scenario makes Gramm notice the empty half of the glass.