In fact, the deficit has dwindled from about $1.2 trillion in 2009 to less than $500 billion in 2014. A Bloomberg poll this month found that 73 percent of Americans think the deficit is getting bigger, while 21 percent think it’s getting smaller and 6 percent aren’t sure. And the public definitely does get stuff wrong. But aren’t the 11 million Americans who have landed new jobs since 2010 and the 10 million Americans who have gotten health insurance since 2013 ordinary Americans? It’s true that wage growth has remained slow, but the overall economic trends don’t jibe with the public’s lousy mood. Second-guessing the wisdom of the public may be the last bastion of political correctness if ordinary people don’t feel good about the economy, then the recovery isn’t supposed to be real. The Chicken Littles who predicted a double-dip recession, runaway interest rates, Zimbabwe-style inflation, a Greece-style debt crisis, skyrocketing energy prices, health insurance “death spirals” and other horrors have been reliably wrong.Ĭome to think of it, the 62 percent of Americans who described the economy as “poor” in a CNN poll a week before the Republican landslide in the midterm elections were also wrong. You don’t have to give credit to President Barack Obama for “America’s resurgence,” as he has started calling it, but there’s overwhelming evidence the resurgence is real. Crime, abortion, teen pregnancy and oil imports are also way down, while renewable power is way up and the American auto industry is booming again. Newt Gingrich promised $2.50 gas it’s down to $2.38. Mitt Romney promised to bring unemployment down to 6 percent in his first term it’s already down to 5.8 percent, half the struggling eurozone’s rate. OK, she was talking about the Senate torture report, not the state of the union, but things in the U.S. As Fox News host Andrea Tantaros proclaimed earlier this month: “The United States is awesome! We are awesome!” You no longer hear much about the Ebola crisis that dominated the headlines in the fall, much less the border crisis that dominated the headlines over the summer. Consumer confidence is soaring, inflation is low, gas prices are plunging, and the budget deficit is shrinking.
Just in time for Christmas, the Dow just hit an all-time high and the uninsured rate is approaching an all-time low.
Oh, and it added 320,000 jobs in November, the best of its unprecedented 57 straight months of private-sector employment growth. economy grew at a rollicking 5 percent rate in the third quarter. Michael Grunwald is a senior staff writer for Politico Magazine.