"Seventy-four percent of Americans believe that the nation is still in
a recession, which may be a sign that the lower and middle classes are
still anxious about unemployment, the value of their homes and stagnant
wages.
In a new Fox News poll,
when asked “For you and your family, does it feel like the recession is
over, or does it feel like the country is still in a recession?”
only 22% said they believed the downturn had ended. The 74% is better
than the 86% from the poll in September 2010, but only barely, if the
“improvements” in gross domestic product and unemployment rates are
taken into account.
The results are troubling if people’s beliefs affect their behavior.
It has been assumed that as unemployment fells and home prices made a
modest recovery, Americans would become more likely to be aggressive
consumers. But recent data tell otherwise. Holiday sales were poor by
most measures. There is little sign that the median household income of
Americans has moved much above the $51,000 that the Census Bureau reported for 2012, and in real dollars this is down from a decade ago. A recent Pew study found that:
But starting in the mid- to late 1970s, the uppermost
tier’s income share began rising dramatically, while that of the bottom
90% started to fall. The top 1% took heavy hits from the dot-com crash
and the Great Recession but recovered fairly quickly: according to
Emmanuel Saez, an economics professor at UC-Berkeley, preliminary
estimates for 2012 (which will be updated next month) have that group
receiving nearly 22.5% of all pretax income, while the bottom 90%’s
share is below 50% for the first time ever (49.6%, to be precise)."
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