To listen to much of the mainstream (read: lefty) media these days, you’d think the economy’s doing just dandy thanks to President Obama’s policies. Happy days are here again, we’re lead to believe by the same commentators who cried wolf when unemployment was about 5% under President Bush.

And yet the national unemployment rate currently sits at 10.2%, the real unemployment rate (which includes people who’ve given up looking for work) is over 17%, and there’s no end to its climb in sight. Even the White House projects a rising unemployment rate well into next year.

Now the Washington Post reports that there’s yet another, er, bump on the road to recovery. Housing has taken an “unexpected” tumble. Apparently expensive government subsidies have little long-term effect after they’ve ended. Go figure.

New home construction took an unexpected tumble last month, reflecting the bumpy nature of a tentative housing recovery.

Housing starts fell 10.6 percent to a seasonally adjusted annual rate of 529,000 in October, according to Commerce Department data. Analysts were expecting an increase. Housing starts were down 30.7 percent compared with the same period a year ago.

The decline probably reflects that nervous builders scaled back amid uncertainty about whether the first-time home-buyer tax credit that had buoyed sales most of the year would expire as scheduled this month, analysts said. Earlier this month, Congress extended the $8,000 tax credit and expanded it to some repeat buyers.

You see, the first-time home-buyer tax credit didn’t convince people who hadn’t intended on buying a home to do so. It just lead those who had already intended on purchasing one in the near future to buy one now. So you’ve succeeded in shoving several months or years of sales into a shorter period of time.

It’s the same problem we had with Cash-for-Clunkers. Very few people who utilized the program were individuals who otherwise wouldn’t have bought a new car. Most were people who were going to buy one sometime in the near future, so they just went out and made the purchase sooner than expected. You haven’t increased the number of sales; you’ve just moved several months or years of sales into a shorter period of time.

It’s like placing six oranges on a table an inch apart from one another. Cash-for-Clunkers and this home tax credit simply moved the oranges into one pile, removing the inch of space. You haven’t added oranges to the table, you’ve just reduced the amount of space between the oranges.

Which is par for the course for Washington. Reorganizing deck chairs on Titanic.