Why Americans Can’t Accept the Good Economic News

[robosmith]

Why Americans Can’t Accept the Good Economic News

Quote

Are you better off today than you were four years ago? That question, first posed by Ronald Reagan in a 1980 presidential-campaign debate with Jimmy Carter, has become the quintessential political question about the economy. And most Americans today, it seems, would say their answer is no. In a new survey by Bankrate published on Wednesday, only 21 percent of those surveyed said their financial situation had improved since Joe Biden was elected president in 2020, against 50 percent who said it had gotten worse. That echoed the results of an ABC News/Washington Post poll from September, in which 44 percent of those surveyed said they were worse off financially since Biden’s election. And in a New York Times/Siena College poll released last week, 53 percent of registered voters said that Biden’s policies had hurt them personally.

As has been much commented on (including by me), this gloom is striking when contrasted with the actual performance of the U.S. economy, which grew at an annual rate of 4.9 percent in the most recent quarter, and which has seen unemployment holding below 4 percent for more than 18 months. But the downbeat mood is perhaps even more striking when contrasted with the picture offered by the Federal Reserve’s recently released Survey of Consumer Finances.

The survey provides an in-depth analysis of the financial condition of American households, conducted for the Fed by the National Opinion Research Center at the University of Chicago. Published every three years, it’s the proverbial gold standard of household research. The latest survey looked at Americans’ net worth as of mid-to-late 2022 and Americans’ income in 2021, comparing them with equivalent data from three years earlier. It found that despite the severe disruption to the economy caused by the pandemic and the recovery from it, Americans across the spectrum saw their incomes and wealth rise over the survey period.

So, even allowing for the high inflation we saw in 2022, no one could really look at the U.S. economy today and say that the policy choices of the past three years made us poorer. Yet that, of course, is precisely how many Americans feel.

Although that pessimism does not bode well for Biden’s reelection prospects, the real problem with it is even more far-reaching: If voters think that policies that helped them actually hurt them, that makes it much less likely that politicians will embrace similar policies in the future. The U.S. got a lot right in its macroeconomic approach over the past three years. Too bad that voters think it got so much wrong. 

 

The lack of understanding of economic data can be explained by them listening to the PROPAGANDA on FOS LIES.

[Michael Hardner]

Disposable income though isn't mentioned here.  As I have pointed out with GDP measures, it makes people above the curve happy but unless you have distribution of wealth then a large number of people don't benefit.

https://www.ibisworld.com/us/bed/per-capita-disposable-income/33/

This seems to say DI went down a lot after the pandemic 

[Deluge]

36 minutes ago, robosmith said:

Why Americans Can’t Accept the Good Economic News

 

The lack of understanding of economic data can be explained by them listening to the PROPAGANDA on FOS LIES.

Leave it to a dumbf*ck Marxist to tell inflation sufferers that everything's OK. lol

[impartialobserver]

when looking at the state of an economy.. you have to look at more than one measurement. Typically, the best metrics are real disposable income, real gdp in a given area, jobs number as measured by QCEW (not CES which is most people use), and then PPE (inflation measure)

[robosmith]

42 minutes ago, Deluge said:

Leave it to a dumbf*ck Marxist to tell inflation sufferers that everything's OK. lol

IF you were a smart shopper, you would NOT PAY inflated prices.

[QuebecOverCanada]

Americans are too dumb to see that inflation is a good thing and that GDP went up which means they got richer.

Or, you're coping.