5 Charts Show the Strength of the Recovery

It’s easy to get lost in the negative economic news. First, there’s the constant stream of troubling policy initiatives from Congress -- health-care repeal, inadvisable tax policy and the like. Then there’s the persistent long-term problem of rising inequality of wealth and income, the worrying slowdown in productivity growth and the persistence of excessively high costs in construction, health care and education. Finally, there’s the looming specter of machine-learning technology, which some people believe threatens to make much of the workforce superfluous.

What often gets lost in all these dismal stories is that the U.S. economy is actually doing well right now. The Great Recession left its share of scars, but the story mostly is one of recovery. And a few areas are looking even brighter than they were in the years before the crash.