Bizzy Blog has a great post about the bizarrely negative polling numbers on the economy. Quoting this column by Brian Wesbury (who is a great writer as well as an extremely perceptive economics guy), he also adds some great source information. Go and read it, then come back; I’ll wait. 
Wesbury says:
During a quarter century of analyzing and forecasting the economy, I have never seen anything like this. No matter what happens, no matter what data are released, no matter which way markets move, a pall of pessimism hangs over the economy.
Bizzy, Wesbury, and several others linked in that article all make a similar point - the economy is demonstrably robust, by almost every common measure. And yet the reporting on it is almost uniformly doom-and-gloom amongst the WORMs (Worn-Out Reactionary Media, as Bizzy calls them; I love that!).
One comment is instructive, though:
You seem to miss the obvious reality here.
Instead of blaming the public for being so stupid as to be manipulated by the evil MSM, you should recognize that when people are asked for their opinion of the economy, they answer from their own perspective, according to their own sphere of expertise. The general public are not trained economists, able to plumb reams of economic statistics in order to make meta-level judgments about the state of the economy as a whole. They answer on the basis of their own economic situation, and the situation of their family, friends, and (very) local communities.
That the economy as a whole is healthy, but that over 40% of the people feel that THEY are in a recessionary situation, should illuminate the problem that republican economic policy tends to bring about. The persistent lack of effective trickle-down from policies that explicitly favor those at the top.
Buzz! Nice ideological backflip, but no dice. TBlumer ably rebuts it:
There’s a vast difference between how people see their own situations and that of the economy. Part of it may be anecdotal (knowing neighbors, friends, or relatives who are struggling), but I doubt that it’s much of a factor, because if it was, it would rub off into worrying about their own situation a lot more.
SO the vast majority of the explanation for the difference between how they feel about their own situation and prospects and how they see things for the economy as a whole is that they’re hearing a constant drumbeat of pessimism about the economy from the WORMs,
In his September 19, 2005 “Digital Rules” column, Forbes editor Rich Karlgard notes an ABC News/Washington Post poll from July which claimed that 59% of Americans were not happy with the economy, but also that 59% liked their own financial condition. He says these conflicting sentiments make no sense.
Well, they do make sense when you realize that the liberal press relentlessly hammers home a message of economic doom and gloom. What’s more, they relentlessly say that everyone around you, all your neighbors, are unhappy and losing their jobs. But individuals look at their own financial condition and realize that everything’s great for them, and then assume that theirs must be a special case and that everyone around them is hurting or otherwise the news wouldn’t be so bad. It makes people think that all their neighbors are broke or losing their jobs, so that makes them unhappy with the economy as a whole.
Of course, the news is trumped up or carefully spun to make it almost unrecognizable. It’s done that way in order to try and harm a president that the press unanimously loathes. But when it’s almost uniformly reported as fact that the economy’s bad and people are having a hard time, lots of people tend to believe it, in spite of the evidence to the contrary in their personal situations.
It’s kind of like if everyone on the block has a great marriage, but they’ve heard that everyone else is getting a divorce, so they don’t say much (don’t want to make the neighbors feel bad over their failed marriages) and they fret publicly about the state of matrimony.
Karlgaard notes in his December 12th, 2005 column:
Sorry, grinches, but the U.S. economy looks like Santa’s sled is being powered by GE/Rolls-Royce jet engines. The third quarter clocked a 3.8% GDP growth rate. The third quarter! Recall: This was the quarter of Katrina, Rita and $70-a-barrel oil. The buckle-your-belt, we’re-going-down quarter. But we didn’t go down. We went up. So did the stock market–up 5% since President Bush raised Ben Bernanke to Alan Greenspan’s throne at the Fed.
TBlumer concludes:
And I finally understand (a bit) why some allegedly conservative politicians in Washington who should know better are considering a tax increase (known in some circles as “repealing the Bush tax cuts”). Please, ladies and gentlemen - ignore the polls, vote the reality.
