Kennedy: 5 reasons we all should be optimistic

photo Mark Kennedy

Only 25 percent of American voters think the United States is heading in the right direction, according to a Rasmussen Reports poll last month. Meanwhile, only 14 percent of us approve of the job being done by Congress, says Gallup.

Bummer.

Still, most of us in America manage to enjoy our lives -- our milk is still cold, our kids make us laugh and we are energized by our worship services. But as soon as you ask if America is headed in the right direction, most people default to "of course not." In the language of Twitter, pessimism is trending.

Sometimes I think it's because we in the media ignore the positives and accentuate the negatives. Also, we have political parties that are so invested in the failure of "the other guys" that any positive news threatens to throw somebody off message. Combine those two influences -- conflict-driven media and angry politics -- and it's little wonder that most Americans think that our economy, if not our entire culture, is circling the drain.

I offer myself as an example of force-fed angst.

A few months ago, I changed jobs. I shifted from being the coordinator of the newspaper's opinion pages to doing more column and magazine writing. Consequently, my daily intake of political commentary shrunk by about 70 percent. I went from an office with a TV where I sometimes toggled back and forth between Fox News and MSNBC, to a nice cubicle with no distractions beyond the gentle white noise of an electric desk fan.

What a relief.

I immediately began to mentally detoxify. My heart felt lighter. My mood improved. I quit thinking as much about foreign policy and mid-term elections.

As a exercise in alternative journalism, I decided last week to dive into a much-discussed but rarely read public document, the Federal Reserve Board's triennial Survey of Consumer Finances, to see if there are any rays of hope for American families in what most people still agree is a lousy economy. The nonpartisan report measures economic conditions in the U.S. between 2010 and 2013.

In the 40-page report, based on interviews with more than 6,000 American families, I found many of the sour notes that dominate today's headline. There was evidence, for example, of stagnant middle-class wages and declining home ownership due to defaults and bankruptcies. The report also confirms that the rich are getting richer -- hardly a stop-the-presses revelation if you believe, as I do, in free enterprise.

But here are some silver linings in the report that rarely see print, and what they might mean in your life:

• Between 2010 and 2013, real gross domestic product in the United States grew at an average rate of 2.1 percent.

What it means: While not the kind of growth that makes economists happy (it needs to be consistently at or above 3 percent for that), the economy has not been technically in a recession (negative GDP for two straight quarters) since 2009, five years ago.

• During the three years of the study, the civilian unemployment rate dropped from 9.9 percent to 7.5 percent and has continued to fall in 2014 -- it was 6.1 percent last month. If you're keeping score, unemployment was about 5 percent in 2007, doubled to a truly awful 10 percent in 2009, and has been improving ever since. We haven't bounced all the way back, but we're close.

What it means: Too many good people are still out of work, but we're almost back to pre-Great Recession unemployment levels. Chances are your cousin in Murfreesboro, who was out of work for a year, is back on the job -- albeit at a lower pay grade.

• The value of corporate equity holdings (aka stocks) grew at an annual rate of just over 10 percent between 2010 and 2013.

What it means: A wise person I know warned me in 2008 not to expect the stock market to return to pre-recession levels for a generation or more. Yet all the major stock indices have recovered smartly, and some have even set new records this year.

Meanwhile, watch for baby boomers to start retiring en masse in the next few years, opening up family-wage job opportunities for today's beleaguered young adults.

• The annual rate of inflation, as measured by the consumer price index, averaged about 2.3 percent from 2010 through 2013.

What it means: The flip side to stagnant wages (bad) is stable prices for consumer goods (good). News stories almost never point out this important correlation.

• Between 2010 and 2013, average interest rates fell: 30-year mortgage rates dropped from 5.3 percent to 3.5 percent, car loans fell from 6.5 percent to 4.7 percent, and credit card interest rates fell from 14.3 percent to 11.9 percent. Meanwhile, median household debt fell a substantial 20 percent.

What it means: That our basic problem -- profligate consumer spending enabled by a historic bubble in housing prices -- has not only corrected but has begun to reverse. Some of us have become downright allergic to debt.

So why is everybody so grumpy? Maybe it's just our nature. Or perhaps, as I suspect, our public pessimism masks an underlying personal optimism that's ultimately more important to a nation built on rugged individualism.

I say that we relax, toast ourselves for surviving the Great Recession, carve both FDR and Ronald Reagan onto Mount Rushmore, and get on with the job of being the most exceptional nation on earth.

Contact Mark Kennedy at mkennedy@timesfreepress.com or 423-757-6645. Follow him on Twitter @TFPCOLUMNIST. Subscribe to his Facebook updates at www.facebook.com/mkennedycolumnist.

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