Americans are told, almost every day, that their lives are getting better. The recession is over. They are about to get the benefits of tax laws. US citizens will keep their Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid benefits, no matter how large the national deficit becomes.

Americans should also be happy with the new Congress. Citizens did vote them in after all.

But, Americans area unhappy, despite all of these blessings.

A new poll from Gallup finds “19% of Americans satisfied with the way things are going in the United States at this time — essentially on par with the lowest level of the past 12 months, 17%, registered in December.”

Gallup add: “The current low level of satisfaction is likely tied primarily to the economy. When U.S. satisfaction reached an all-time high of 71% in February 1999, 6% of Americans named the economy as the most important problem facing the country.”

It seems that Americans think they have been lied to. Unemployment is still high. Homes cannot be sold. People do not have access to credit in many cases. The newspaper headlines say that the US is running out of money. America’s debt is too high to be sustainable. Programs such as Social Security will eventually have to be cut back.

“You can fool some of the people all of the time, and all of the people some of the time. But, you cannot fool all of the people all of the time,” said Abraham Lincoln.

Methodology Results for this Gallup poll are based on telephone interviews conducted Jan. 7-9, 2011, with a random sample of 1,018 adults, aged 18 and older, living in the continental U.S., selected using random-digit-dial sampling.

Douglas A. McIntyre

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