Economy Is Getting Better, Except For The Aged

A new Gallup poll says people are more optimistic than they have been in three years.

Forty-one percent of Americans in January said the economy is “getting better,” up from 35% in December and 38% a year ago. This level of optimism ties for the highest since Gallup Daily tracking began in January 2008.

Gallup has broken down the data by age, sex, region of the country and income. Across almost every group there is an improvement in perception. That is not true among the old and the poor.

Among Americans over 65, only 35% say that the economy has begun to improve.  Many retirees do not have adequate savings and people who live to 90 may run out of money years before they die.

Poor Americans also have reasons to be less optimistic about their economic fates.  Data from the Labor Department shows that lower income and poorly educated people have a much harder time finding a job.  More than 16 million people in the US are out of work. Individuals who are white and college graduates are not going to stand on the unemployment line for long.

The recovery is uneven, as they say.

Methodology: Results are based on telephone interviews conducted with 8,755 respondents, aged 18 and older, living in all 50 U.S. states and the District of Columbia, during January 2011 as part of Gallup Daily tracking, selected using random-digit-dial sampling.

Douglas A. McIntyre