Hate to say “I told you so” but the darkening signs in the economy are growing. The New York Times reports that consumer confidence has dropped:

Americans are more pessimistic than they have been all year about the state of the economy, according to a new report that reflects a widespread view that a period of brisk growth is coming to an end.

The Conference Board said yesterday that in its monthly survey, American consumer confidence fell sharply in August to its lowest level since last November. The latest index reading of 99.6 was below the 107.0 reported in July, and represented the steepest single-month decline since the immediate aftermath of Hurricane Katrina a year ago.

And then over at The Wall Street Journal you can read a piece that says that while median income grew slightly:

But the gap between the richest and poorest Americans widened last year, continuing a trend that dates to the early 1970s with a pause in the late 1990s. The top fifth of American households claimed 50.4% of all income last year, the largest slice since the Census Bureau started tracking the data in 1967.

The new data, from telephone and in-person interviews with 114,384 households, come amid polling data that suggest concern about the economy among many middle-income Americans — an anxiety that Democrats hope to exploit in November’s congressional elections.

“There is nothing to celebrate here,” said Ron Haskins, a former Bush administration official now at the Brookings Institution. “A lot of the money goes to the top, and Republicans are forever playing defense on this. The people in the middle are feeling squeezed. If Democrats aren’t getting the best of the argument, they should be.”

Liberal-leaning analysts yesterday emphasized that despite a robust economy, the rich are getting richer while the poor are treading water. Conservative-leaning analysts emphasized that the median household income is up and the poverty rate is flat.

The Census Bureau said the number of Americans without health insurance rose by 1.4 million last year to 46.6 million, or 15.9% of the population. The poverty rate barely budged, falling to 12.6% from 12.7%, a change the bureau said isn’t statistically significant but is an early signal that the poverty rate is starting to level off after four years of increases. About 37 million Americans were living below the official poverty line in 2005.

It’s still amazing that the Democrats can’t seem to find their voice and say “single payer health care” despute the growing numbers of people without health coverage.