Over the past months, we’ve seen a fascinating phenomenon. The public mood has detached from the economic cycle. In normal times, economic recoveries produce psychological recoveries. At least at the moment, that seems not to be happening.
The U.S. has experienced nine straight months of slow economic growth. The unemployment rate has fallen, and, in March, the U.S. economy added a robust 216,000 jobs. Yet the public mood is darkening, not brightening. The New York Times/CBS News poll showed a 13 percentage point increase in the number of Americans who believe things are getting worse. The Gallup Economic Confidence Index is now as low as it has been since the height of the recession.
Krugman ably dissected this one on the facts: "the economy" is getting better, but people's job prospects aren't. The employment/population ratio is stuck at about 58.5%, as it has been for about the past year and a half. The unemployment rate is only going down because people have given up looking for work. When some of the few employers who actually have job openings are saying "if you're currently unemployed, don't even bother applying," who can blame them? How do you get out?
And they're not getting out: as Krugman also notes, the mean duration of unemployment has skyrocketed to 39 weeks, which is 9 months.
There are very few households in this country that could endure 9 months of unemployment without going through every last bit of their savings. And that's not even considering the millions of families that the banksters have foreclosed on.
What Krugman can't ask, but I can, is what sort of stupid, idiotic, ignorant shit does David Brooks have to be, to be unaware of all this in the first place? Gawd, what a loathsome little turd.
The 'Big Disconnect' (the title of his column) isn't between 'the economy' and the mood of the citizenry, once one factors in people's actual job prospects into one's definition of 'the economy.'
No, the 'Big Disconnect' is between the lives of an extremely affluent commentariat, and the lives of most Americans. Hardly any of those guys evince the least awareness of what real families out there are going through, these days.
And they probably have no idea - they were probably born upper middle class or better, went to the best schools, married someone from an equally affluent background, and their incomes skyrocketed into the stratosphere when they became a part of the official commentariat.
They have no idea of the struggles of so many families to make ends meet on $50K a year (Brooks chides those earning earning between $30,000 and $75,000 for having "become extremely gloomy" - the nerve of them, being pessimistic when Brooks says everything's looking up!) or the toll that working-class jobs take on their bodies. They have no idea what it's like to figure out how to retire on Social Security alone, because they ate up their retirement savings while being out of work for 9 months, and the Brookses of the world are telling them that they must sacrifice a chunk of their Social Security as well.
The title for Brooks' column should have been a simpler phrase, with a long and quite appropriate pedigree:
Let Them Eat Cake.
