Americans earned a smaller average income in 2005 than in 2000, the fifth consecutive year that they had to make ends meet with less money than at the peak of the last economic expansion, new government data shows.

Tony Fratto, a White House spokesman, attributed the drop in average incomes to “the significant wrenching hits that our economy took in 2001 and 2002, so no one should be surprised that what a bubble economy created in the late 1990s and 2000, where economic data were skewed, would take some time to recover.”

It might have also been nice had either story mentioned the great likelihood that the Internal Revenue Service data the newspapers relied on will show further income gains for 2006 and 2007, given the state of the economy and the continuing rise in real wages. I would have also liked to have the seen the two stories give a nod to the fact that government numbers tend to overstate inflation, and thus real incomes probably did even better than the official numbers show. How about this for a fair headline: "Incomes Grow for Third Straight Year, Though Still Below 2000 Peak"?