On The Rise.(A)(EDITORIALS)(Editorial)

Economy: Pundits and politicians keep talking about the fragile U.S. "recovery." They should know better. This isn't a recovery; it's an expansion.

This isn't just a quibble. One side in the political debate has much to gain if economic conditions are painted as darkly as possible. Misery sells. Perhaps that's why presidential candidate John Kerry has suggested in campaign stops that we haven't "turned the corner."

In fact, we're now in a solid expansion, not a recovery. With the exception of a deficit in payroll jobs, all the ground lost to the last recession has been recovered.

The 2001 recession, moreover, was milder than first thought. New government data for 2001, 2002 and 2003 show the economy never shrank for two quarters. Some in the media mistake that to mean no recession. After all, everyone knows a recession is defined as two straight quarters of declining GDP, right?

Wrong. That's a rule of thumb used by Wall Street and some economists, and often misinterpreted by the media. Only one organization determines when -- and if -- the U.S. has entered recession. It's the National Bureau of Economic Research, a private academic think tank.

And the NBER, in its words, "gives relatively little weight to real GDP because it is only measured quarterly ...