Americans Even More Pessimistic Amid New Economic News

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The economic news just keeps piling on.

A new poll released by The Hill says a full one-third of Americans expect to be worse off by November of 2012.

More than one in three likely voters expect to be worse off when they go to the polls a year from this November, a somber fact for President Obama’s reelection campaign, while just 25 percent believe they will be better off, according to this week’s The Hill poll.

Even more directly:

Thirty-nine percent said they expect to be in the same economic position they are now, but 65 percent also said they believe the country is on the wrong track.

That, it seems to me, is a direct indictment of the President’s policies. The country is still evenly split on whether this is still Bush’s recession or Obama’s. Of course many of those who blame Bush for the current economic situation forget (or neglect to mention) that the Democrats took control of Congress in January of 2007 – it was less than a year of Democratic congressional policy before the recession began to trample the economy, and less then two years before the stock market imploded.

I’m not offering much of a defense of Bush because the fact is he continued a policy of government expansion at the cost of debt and cheap money. However, Obama has taken those ills and magnified them 500% with massive deficits and no end in sight to dramatic expansion of the federal government.

Democratic group Third Way has a handy chart indicating just what happens to presidents running for reelection during times of high unemployment (credit: Hot Air).

In other economic dread news CBS is running the headline, “Chronic unemployment worse than Great Depression” and the article is about as warm and fuzzy as you might guess.

About 6.2 million Americans, 45.1 percent of all unemployed workers in this country, have been jobless for more than six months – a higher percentage than during the Great Depression.

Long term unemployment is hard for lots of obvious reasons. Savings run out, unemployment assistance runs out, the gap on your resume actually makes it harder for you to find employment. It’s a serious problem.

The question is whether voters will respond to that problem by voting for the candidate more likely to create jobs, or the one more likely to make it “easier” to remain unemployed.