You've just to love it.

Honestly, you just can't make this stuff up.

One day after the business media engaged in an epic bout of hand-wringing over a decline in home sales values, a new report out today shows that consumers have looked at the housing mess, saw that it impacted only about 1% of the population, and have decided to go right on spending money and helping the economy.

This on top of yesterday's equally good news that the U.S. Gross Domestic product index was revised upward for the 2nd quarter, to 3.8% -- a good number in any economy, but especially this one.

Here's how CNN.com played today's story. "Consumer spending stayed strong in August, despite the problems in mortgage and real estate markets that some feared would put a brake on Americans' willingness to open their wallets, according to a government report issued Friday."

Why can't the business media admit that the "some feared" mentioned in the above quote is the "we'll start a recession if it kills us" business media, itself? Certainly, Wall Street and Main Street, as evidenced by yesterday's GDP numebr and today's consumer sentiment number, don't feel that way.

That's why today's new economic number is so deliciously ironic. The U.S. Commerce Department reports that consumer confidence for August -- notoriously a sluggish month for end-of-summer weary consuemrs - rose 0.6%, ahead of July's number of 0.4%.

The economic analysis firm Briefing.com published a survey, also out today, where economists said that the August consumer numbers would remain at 0.4%. Better yet, the Commerce Department reported that, year-to-year (a key timeframe for the Federal Reserve top gauge consumer sentiment) showed a 1.8 percent rise on that basis, after a 1.9 percent rise in the previous readings for both June and July. According to most economists, any year-to-year consumer number over one percent is a sign of good economic health. It also shows that inflation, long a bane of Federal Reserve policy, continues to remain in check.

That could easily allow the Fed to cut interest rates even more when it next meets on October 31, a move that would trigger a new bout of consumer and business spending and spur the economy on to greater heights.

"If the Fed wants to cut, inflation isn't going to enter into the equation," Gus Faucher, the director of macroeconomics for Moody's Economy.com, told CNN.com.

Even the chronically negative business media has to admit that things aren't as bad as they have been reporting them to be. Says CNN, "Still strong consumer spending is also suggesting that the risk of a slowdown in the economy may be less than many economists and the Fed believed when the central bank cut interest rates by a half percentage point earlier this month."

Rich Yamarone, director of economic research at Argus Research., put another dagger in the heart of the dour media mavens hoping for a recession. "It's clear that consumers aren't rolling over any time soon," he says. "A worst case scenario is that consumers will be spending at more than twice the pace of increase in the third quarter that they did in the second."

If that's the case, then inflation could be a problem. But it's not a bad problem to have. I'd rather battle the "I" word than the "R" word any day of the week.