"For every statistic you can find, I can find one that tells if not a different story, a more nuanced one. Yes, the jobless rate is 5 percent, but the underemployment rate, juiced by 6 million part-timers who want full-time jobs, is a considerably less comfortable 9.7 percent. No question, wages are rising, but the major source of real income growth over the past year has been low inflation. Paychecks aren’t growing so fast as much as prices have been growing a lot more slowly. ....So I think I get why some people are unsatisfied with the economy and beyond. Growth hasn’t reached all corners by a long shot, and policymakers have too often been at best unresponsive to that reality and at worst, just plain awful."
I think this misses the point. Sure, no economy is perfect, certainly not this one. So of course you can always find plenty of things to kvetch about.
But why bother when you can just ask people directly how they're doing? If you do that, you'll find that their responses are fairly positive: better than in 2009, worse than in 1999. But overall, pretty unremarkable. No matter how many economic statistics you haul out, the bottom line remains the same: on average, Americans don't say they're any more or less happy about the economy than they usually are. So unless they're lying, the economy just isn't a big factor in the anger driving this year's election.
So why are voters so angry?
http://www.motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2016/06/american-anger-report-its-all-about-republicans-and-obama
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