It's your other money.

Cheaters are bilking Medicare. It's Your Money! Deadbeats are not repaying the Small Business Administration. It's Your Money! An expensive courthouse in Houma, Louisiana, is mostly empty. It's Your Money!

And yadda yadda. Why am I yawning here? Watchdog journalism is good, no? Why

I'll tell you why. Here are some Fleecings from this summer: government pays legal bills for energy companies, a cold war leftover; government allows Medicare double-billing; government sells a piece of broadcast spectrum too cheaply; government wastes tax money on empty prison cells in California. I do appreciate it when journalists eyeball my tax dollars. And individually, these stories are tasty and nutritious. But the regular mantra-like insistence on one skinny focus, wasted tax money -- combined with TV journalism's general unwillingness to explore the forces and practices and assumptions and fleecings that create my real money problems -- feels almost like a form of pandering.

Here we are, riding this endlessly purring economy like kids in a convertible. Each morning the man on the radio reports yesterday's new high for the Dow Jones Industrial Average. Each month the Great American Job Machine beats the unemployment statistics down to new lows. People fly off welfare. Inflation sleeps. Deficits shrink. Newsweek counts new billionaires.

Yet something's off. Consumer debt has more than doubled in the past decade and is up 51 percent in the last three years alone. Personal bankruptcy hit a historic high last year. According to the American Bankruptcy Institute, 1,125,006 consumers filed -- up 29 percent from the year before and 250 percent since 1986. Job security is a dream from the past. Fulltime work with good benefits can be elusive. Most important, rising income is not a part of this economic expansion. Alan B. Krueger, a Princeton economics professor, calculates that fro the last peak in the business cycle, in 1989, to now, median earnings in real dollars are down 5 percent. Even when Krueger cuts off the leaner part of that cycle, starting instead from 1994 median earnings are down 2 percent. Despite spectacularly rising corporate profits, real-dollar raises -- which American once took for granted, particularly in good times -- remain rare. It's Your Money!