Via Greg Sargent, this should scare the piss out of every Democrat.
I’d like you to compare your financial situation to what it was four years ago, during the last presidential election when George W. Bush was still president. Would you say that you are financially better off now than you were four years ago, or are you financially worse off?
Better off: 47
Worse off: 41
Only a six point margin from the crappy Bush years when we suffered from two different recessions, one of them being the deepest since the Great Depression. This is phenomenally bad news if it bears out in other "are you better off?" polls. Though I'd like to remind everyone of something I wrote this week. To repeat:
GDP is growing steadily. Jobs are being added every month. Unemployment is slowly declining (with a few blips along the trendline). The deficit is shrinking. Middle and working class taxes are lower. Inflation is nearly an entire percentage point below the average that began in the middle 1920s (long term average is 3.43%, while our current rate is 2.3% and dropping). The price of oil dropped below $90 last week and stockpiles are huge -- the highest level in 22 years. New home sales are up by 10 percent over a year ago. Moody's Analytics is calling this a "genuine rebound" in housing and mortgage rates remain tantalizingly low. Consumer debt is declining and corporate profits -- despite the president's false reputation as a profit-hating commie -- are nearly double what they were in the boom times of 1999. 9.75 percent at the end of 2011, compared with 5.7 percent in the final quarter of 1999. The Dow has doubled since the deepest, darkest days of the Great Recession and some analysts suggest that the DJIA should be around 20,000, not 13,000, given all of these positive indicators.
Are the American people better off? They should be. And if they're not, they ought to look at the party they elected to run Congress in 2010 -- the party that's filibustered or blocked every job creation measure. Every single one.