Worry About Unemployment Surges

Americans can see the writing on the wall. The economy is no longer creating new jobs. August unemployment was flat. Private sector job additions have slowed to a few thousand a  month. These factors will sap whatever optimism might have come from the brief economic recovery late last year and early this one.

Gallup shows in a recent poll that “Thirty-nine percent of Americans in September name unemployment or jobs as the most important problem facing the country, up from 29% in August. Unemployment has now passed ‘the economy’ as the most frequently mentioned issue.”

The data indicate that, even with a bitter battle in Washington, the federal budget deficit has become less and less important to many Americans. The trouble that Congress and the Administration have had with tax cut resolutions and a jobs bill will trigger worse employment opportunities, many people seem to think.

The shift toward concerns about jobs is an acknowledgement a new recession has begun. Americans probably count jobs as the best measure of the economy. It is their most immediate way to analyze their ability to live with even the basics paid for — food, housing and energy. More than 16 million Americans are out of work. Many people must ask, if the economy takes a sharp dip, will they join the lines of the unemployed.

The recession’s new beginning has an aspect of a self-fulfilling prophesy to it. Concerns about jobs cut consumer spending. A drop in consumer spending usually triggers more layoffs. The cycle goes around and around. It may be that this turning never ended in the period since the Great Recession.

Jobs are the best barometer of how Americans see the future. Their confidence has started to erode quickly, if Gallup is right.

Methodology: Results for this Gallup poll are based on telephone interviews conducted Sept. 8-11, 2011, with a random sample of 1,017 adults, aged 18 and older, living in all 50 U.S. states and the District of Columbia.

Douglas A. McIntyre