Today's article is discussing how for the first time since President Obama took office, a significant majority of Americans think that the economy is going on the right direction. 52% of people surveyed in a new CNN/ORC poll describe the U.S. economy as very or somewhat good, while 48% say it's as very or somewhat poor.
The author describe Americans as they are the most optimistic since before the Great Recession. He adds, it's good news for the White House and Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton. According to CNN/ORC, Over 66% of those polled believe the economy will be in good shape a year from now. On the other hand, 38% said it will be in poor shape.
After that, the author asks logical question that should be asked. what is causing people to have a better feeling about the economy for the first time in seven years? He is offering an answer for in this article. According to the author, the first cause is that people feel better about economy because they feel more confident about getting a job. Especially, after creating almost three million jobs last year which made it the best year of employment growth since 1999. Nevertheless, the unemployment in 2009 was about 10% while today it is nearly 5.5% which not far from what is considered healthy.
On top of that, Americans seem more confident about quitting their jobs which proves that people are feeling more comfortable about finding jobs than before. 42% say they are better off financially than a year ago, compared with 34% who are worse off and 23% who are in the same situation.
The second cause in the article is that Americans love cheap gas. The average price of a gallon of gasoline has decreased 34% over the past year, according to Federal Reserve data. "It's a de-facto tax cut. Everyone has extra money in their pockets," said Greg Valliere, chief political strategist at the Potomac Research Group. However, the author says he would not think Obama can take all the credit for cheap energy prices but he may be still benefiting from that anyway.
A couple of other factors could be how economic confidence has also been driven by countless other forces, including the stock market. regardless of the shaky start of 2015, the Dow
