{"id":17,"date":"2026-05-15T17:45:55","date_gmt":"2026-05-15T17:45:55","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/americanlivingreport.com\/?p=17"},"modified":"2026-05-15T17:45:55","modified_gmt":"2026-05-15T17:45:55","slug":"the-real-reason-americans-hate-the-economy-so-much","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/americanlivingreport.com\/?p=17","title":{"rendered":"The real reason Americans hate the economy so much"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Americans\u2019 doom and despair about the economy is mounting.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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In fact, by one measure, the public is more depressed than they\u2019ve ever<\/em> been in the postwar era. The University of Michigan has been surveying American consumers\u2019 sentiment since all the way back in 1952 \u2014 and from last month was the lowest level they\u2019ve ever found.<\/p>\n

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A CNN survey this week found deepening doubts about the core of the American dream. Asked whether most people can get ahead if they\u2019re willing to work hard, 47 percent of respondents agreed. A decade ago, in 2016, 67 percent agreed. And the swing toward pessimism was relatively similar regardless of age, race, or gender.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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President Donald Trump\u2019s approval ratings on the economy also hit new all-time lows in recent weeks, in polls from both (which showed him at 39 percent) and CNN (which showed him all the way down at 30 percent).<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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All this is occurring while several key topline economic stats \u2014 such as GDP growth and jobs numbers \u2014 continue to look decent or outright good, and while the stock market remains near all-time highs.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Yet the American people are furious, for the same basic reason they\u2019ve been furious most of this decade: high prices and the cost of living. In an open-ended question in , 76 percent of respondents offered some variation on affordability as the biggest economic problem facing their family.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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For that particular problem, there\u2019s no end in sight \u2014 indeed, recent economic news suggests it\u2019s getting worse:<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Yet as painful as the 2020s inflation has been, there\u2019s still a bit of a puzzle about why exactly it appears to be overwhelming all other economic indicators in Americans\u2019 minds this time around \u2014 making people feel worse than they did even in inflationary periods that were far more prolonged and severe.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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A new article from two economists proposes one explanation for what they term the \u201cvibe gap\u201d: that the past few decades fundamentally changed Americans\u2019 expectations for the economy in ways that have left them more outraged than ever before. If they\u2019re right, it could be quite a while before consumers start feeling like happy days are here again.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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When did Americans get so negative, exactly?<\/h2>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
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In explaining Americans\u2019 bad economic vibes, some point to decades-long economic trends like the rise of inequality or the failure of the country to adequately recover from the Great Recession. Others are inclined toward big society-wide explanations that don\u2019t have much to do with the economy at all \u2014 for instance, negativity on social media, or deepening political partisanship.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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These explanations simply don\u2019t fit the data based on the timing. That\u2019s because, in the mid-to-late 2010s, Americans thought the economy was doing just great. And, as you may recall if you\u2019re old enough, social media negativity and intense political partisanship existed plenty back then.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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The University of Michigan\u2019s monthly survey is widely held to be the gold standard on measuring US consumers\u2019 sentiment about the economy. The number they report is an index based on how positively survey respondents answer various questions. (Its peak was 110, in early 2000, at the height of the dot com bubble.)<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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During President Barack Obama\u2019s second term and Trump\u2019s first term, the index was regularly in the nineties, and even the high nineties for Trump. But the pandemic \u2014 and then, even more so, the post-pandemic inflation of the Biden years \u2014 sent it plummeting, to a nadir of 53 in the summer of 2022.<\/p>\n

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Things slowly began looking better as President Joe Biden\u2019s term stretched on, albeit well short of the highs of the 2010s. Then Trump\u2019s second term sent it crashing downward again \u2014 with the decline spurred first by his tariffs, and more recently by the Iran war and surging gas prices.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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The prices, they aren\u2019t coming down<\/h2>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
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It\u2019s not exactly news that Americans are irate about high prices \u2014 it\u2019s been the central political story of the 2020s.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Still, the sheer depth of rage and despair has been somewhat of a puzzle to economists, who tend to believe that the current economy really isn\u2019t anywhere near as bad as the public appears to think.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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They point to healthier current indicators like GDP and job growth, and argue that things have certainly been far worse at many points in the past. Inflation in the 1970s, for instance, was far more severe and lasted far longer than that of the 2020s \u2014 yet it\u2019s now that the consumer sentiment index hit an all-time low. And the consumer sentiment index typically matched \u201chard\u201d economic data measures of well-being \u2014 until, in the 2020s, it stopped doing that.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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What accounts for the difference? One new and compelling theory, put forth by economists Jared Bernstein and Daniel Posthumus this month, is that there\u2019s a gap between the economy that Americans expected to have and the one they\u2019re getting that\u2019s proving especially hard to reconcile.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Inflation was a major problem between the mid-1960s and early 1980s. But once the Federal Reserve finally got it under control, it stayed relatively low regardless of what else was going on in the economy.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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As a result, Americans are now comparing how much things \u201cshould\u201d cost based on not just the last few years, but a sustained four-decade period of predictably smooth price increases. And for most workers, it was the only economy they\u2019d ever known: \u201cNobody under the age of 43 in 2022 would have been alive during the last time inflation breached 7.5 percent, much less actively participating in the economy,\u201d the authors noted.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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To test their theory, Bernstein and Posthumus added a new variable that accounted for consumers\u2019 expectations for price levels over time, and found that their model predicts recent dismal consumer sentiment far better.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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In that context, the 2020s inflation no longer seems like a typical economic headwind \u2014 it comes off as an outright betrayal, a sign that something had been fundamentally broken in the economy.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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And if the recent ominous inflation data is any indication, it still hasn\u2019t been put back together again.<\/p>\n

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Did decades of low inflation make the public far more unforgiving when it finally did surge?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":16,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-17","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-politics"],"yoast_head":"\nThe real reason Americans hate the economy so much - American Living Report<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/americanlivingreport.com\/?p=17\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"The real reason Americans hate the economy so much - American Living Report\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"Did decades of low inflation make the public far more unforgiving when it finally did surge?\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:url\" content=\"https:\/\/americanlivingreport.com\/?p=17\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:site_name\" content=\"American Living Report\" \/>\n<meta property=\"article:published_time\" content=\"2026-05-15T17:45:55+00:00\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:image\" content=\"https:\/\/americanlivingreport.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/05\/e922d2f18ce39625eaac5434d8c19200.webp\" \/>\n\t<meta property=\"og:image:width\" content=\"1200\" \/>\n\t<meta property=\"og:image:height\" content=\"626\" \/>\n\t<meta property=\"og:image:type\" content=\"image\/webp\" \/>\n<meta name=\"author\" content=\"admin\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:card\" content=\"summary_large_image\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:label1\" content=\"Written by\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:data1\" content=\"admin\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:label2\" content=\"Est. reading time\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:data2\" content=\"5 minutes\" \/>\n<script type=\"application\/ld+json\" class=\"yoast-schema-graph\">{\"@context\":\"https:\\\/\\\/schema.org\",\"@graph\":[{\"@type\":\"Article\",\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/americanlivingreport.com\\\/?p=17#article\",\"isPartOf\":{\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/americanlivingreport.com\\\/?p=17\"},\"author\":{\"name\":\"admin\",\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/americanlivingreport.com\\\/#\\\/schema\\\/person\\\/7b970e3bc484fe2e26860a4380d70de8\"},\"headline\":\"The real reason Americans hate the economy so much\",\"datePublished\":\"2026-05-15T17:45:55+00:00\",\"mainEntityOfPage\":{\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/americanlivingreport.com\\\/?p=17\"},\"wordCount\":1055,\"commentCount\":0,\"image\":{\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/americanlivingreport.com\\\/?p=17#primaryimage\"},\"thumbnailUrl\":\"https:\\\/\\\/americanlivingreport.com\\\/wp-content\\\/uploads\\\/2026\\\/05\\\/e922d2f18ce39625eaac5434d8c19200.webp\",\"articleSection\":[\"Politics\"],\"inLanguage\":\"en-US\",\"potentialAction\":[{\"@type\":\"CommentAction\",\"name\":\"Comment\",\"target\":[\"https:\\\/\\\/americanlivingreport.com\\\/?p=17#respond\"]}]},{\"@type\":\"WebPage\",\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/americanlivingreport.com\\\/?p=17\",\"url\":\"https:\\\/\\\/americanlivingreport.com\\\/?p=17\",\"name\":\"The real reason Americans hate the economy so much - 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