Robert Reich: A 'general sense of dread' is souring Americans on a strong economy

11 July 2023

In his New York Times column, liberal economist Paul Krugman has often expressed frustration over the fact that so many Americans are feeling sour about the U.S. economy despite low unemployment numbers under President Joe Biden. Those numbers continued in June, when the United States' unemployment rate, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS), was 3.6 percent.

The COVID-19 pandemic brought on a brief recession in the U.S. in 2020, but unemployment plummeted in the Biden era.

Another left-of-center economist, Robert Reich, tackles that subject in a July 10 op-ed for The Guardian. Reich, who teaches economics at the University of California, Berkeley and served as secretary of labor in the Clinton Administration, lays out some reasons why many Americans are feeling pessimistic despite low unemployment.

"On Friday," Reich notes, "the Labor Department announced that the U.S. economy added 209,000 jobs in June…. Last Thursday, we learned that the U.S. economy grew at an annualized 2 percent rate in the first quarter of this year. That's well above economists' expectations of around 1.4 percent. But if you haven't received this news, you're not alone. Good economic news doesn't make it through the negative sludge of Fox News or Newsmax. It barely gets through the mainstream media."

Reich continues, "You want some additional good news? In the four years of Donald Trump's administration, total investment on manufacturing facilities grew by 5 percent. During the first two years of Biden's administration, manufacturing investment more than doubled. This has created about 800,000 manufacturing jobs."

The UC Berkeley economist notes that inflation is "still a problem" but has "declined significantly from its mid-2022 highs above 9 percent." Reich goes on to say, however, that despite an abundance of good economic news, Biden's "approval numbers have been stuck at around 43 percent." And he believes that the reasons for the widespread angst goes way beyond inflation.

"So, the obvious question is: Why are Americans feeling so bad about an economy that's actually damned good?" Reich writes. "One reason, I think, is a general sense of dread — centering on (former President Donald) Trump, (Florida Gov. Ron) DeSantis and Republican lawmakers in general — that seems to affect everything else. I don't know about you, but I sometimes have difficulty getting to sleep, worried about the rise of authoritarian fascism in America. Add in the effects of the climate crisis, and you get more gloom.… Then, too, many of us are still suffering from pandemic-related PTSD."

Reich adds, "But I think the deeper reason Americans don't feel very good about the economy is that is that the vast number of working non-college grads — some two-thirds of the adult U.S. population — are still bogged down in dead-end jobs lacking any economic security, while struggling with many costs, such as housing, childcare and education, that continue to soar. In other words, the economy is getting better overall, but overall has become a less useful gauge of wellbeing as the rich get richer, the poor grow poorer, and the working middle is under worsening siege."

Read Robert Reich's full op-ed for The Guardian at this link.

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