Everywhere in the news there are reports of disaster
Americans' confidence in the economy fell to a new low, dragged down by worries about mounting job losses, record-high home foreclosures and zooming energy prices.
According to the RBC Cash Index, confidence dropped to a mark of 29.5 in April, down from 33.1 in March. The new reading was the worst since the index began in 2002. It marked the fourth month in a row where confidence has fallen to an all-time low.
"Consumers are very pessimistic," said Mark Vitner, economist at Wachovia. "There are not a lot of happy campers out there."
More than 80 percent of Americans believe the country is headed in the wrong direction, the highest such number since the early 1990s, according to a new survey.
The CBS News-New York Times poll released Thursday showed 81 percent of respondents said they believed "things have pretty seriously gotten off on the wrong track." That was up from 69 percent a year ago, and 35 percent in early 2002.
Oh there's more
A poll released Monday by Rasmussen Reports found that 63% of Americans believe the U.S. government isn't doing enough to help out the economy, while 19% believe the government's response has been adequate this election year.
But, as always, that's not the whole story. Part of America's problem with the Government's response is that many think the Government is doing too much, not too little.
...48% of voters say the best thing the government can do is get out of the way by reducing taxes and regulations.
Speaking of taxes, it is not a given that Americans want the tax cuts to expire as a way of fixing the economy. When asked "Would you favor or oppose making those tax cuts permanent?", 54% favor making them permanent while only 40% want to see them expire.
And all that anxiety about the economy? It's not the respondent's own financial situation that is the concern; the respondent is concerned about everyone else
When looking at the state of their own finances, more than 70% claimed that their personal financial situation was fairly good or excellent.
And that concern about the sub-prime mortgages, not many are interested in bailing out the homeowners who are falling behind. A recent survey showed that 53% do not want the federal government to help homeowners who are struggling to pay their mortgage.
These results are consistent with earlier surveys showing that most Americans believed individual borrowers were to blame for the mortgage crisis.
A separate survey found that most believe the troubled homeowners should buy a smaller house.
And yet, the picture that is being painted is that we are living in desperate times and that the Government should do more to fix things.
Yet the unemployment rate is still only 5.1% which is historically quite low and 70% deem their personal financial situation just peachy.
But all of this distress, according to Back Obama, is driving people to love guns and the baby Jesus
``You go into some of these small towns in Pennsylvania and, like a lot of small towns in the Midwest, the jobs have been gone now for 25 years and nothing's replaced them,'' Obama said, according to an audio recording on the Huffington Post Web site.
``And it's not surprising then they get bitter, they cling to guns, or religion, or antipathy to people who aren't like them, or anti-immigrant sentiment, or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations,'' Obama said.
Oh, and did I mention that one of the things that people want the government to do is stop illegal immigration?
Fifty-six percent (56%) believe that stopping illegal immigration would help the economy.
Yeah, and 73% of Americans support the right to own and use guns
So it seems pretty clear that desperation is not the cause of these sentiments. People are concerned about gas prices but our efforts to make us more energy independent by drilling in our country have been stymied by disagreements in Congress. And people are confused about what actually causes high gas prices: they believe energy companies are the problem and conservation is the solution.
People are concerned about rising health care costs, but everyone wants to live forever and they think the health care system is broken.
And People are concerned about the cost of education.
But these are not issues that directly relate to the economy and jobs. These are not the kinds of issues that cause desperate people, living in desperate times to run to guns and religion.
The illusion of desperate times serves a political purpose to populists if they can convince you that that a Depression is on its way, if not already here.
Is the fact that the media abets this illusion a political statement?
I'd say it very much is.
