Jobless Recovery
Americans are losing faith in the nation’s economic recovery even as forecasters expect growth to accelerate, according to a Bloomberg National Poll.
Fewer people anticipate improvement in the economy’s strength over the next year than in the last survey in June, with 27 percent saying the expansion will be more robust, down from 39 percent who expected improvement three months earlier.
Forty-four percent of poll respondents say they expect the economy, which has expanded for nine consecutive quarters, to remain about the same, while 28 percent see it weakening.
We’re still in a recession; I don’t know why they say it’s over,” says Chris Sams, 28, a disabled Navy veteran from Daingerfield, Texas. “It may be over in Washington, D.C., where the per capita income is higher than anywhere else, but down here the minimum wage is the highest wage.”
The results of the Sept. 20-23 poll reflect public impatience with an economy that has grown at an average rate of 2.1 percent since the recession’s June 2009 end, a full percentage point below the 50-year average, according to data compiled by Bloomberg. Growth will slip to 1.60 percent this year, according to the median forecast in a Bloomberg survey of economists, before rebounding to 2.65 percent growth next year.
There are a lot of ways to gauge how bad the Great Recession was and how slack the recovery has been, from the stagnation of household incomes to the increase in young adults living with their parents. But perhaps no metric hits more people harder than jobs — specifically, how many were lost and how slowly they are coming back.
In fact, not only were more jobs wiped out in the Great Recession than any other post-World War II downturn — 8.7 million, or 6.3% of the pre-recession peak payroll — but it’s taking longer to regain them than it did in the previous two post-recession recoveries combined.
