From The LA Times
By Peter Gosselin

Economists — and what few friends the Bush administration still has — seem flabbergasted at how bleak Americans have grown about their economic prospects.

True, gasoline has shot past $4 a gallon. And house prices keep dropping. And unemployment is creeping higher and higher.

But is this really enough to send consumer confidence plunging to near-record lows? To convince more than 8 in 10 Americans that the country is headed in the wrong direction? Surely something else must be at work.

Republicans and some economic analysts think they know what that something is: Democratic doomsayers. Republican Rep. Virginia Foxx of North Carolina recently distilled this view with Nixonian flourish, declaring: “This is not a failed economy. We are not in recession. What a shame that Democrats want to talk down the economy.”

But I think there’s a better explanation for the public’s dark mood, one that’s closer at hand and deeper running than the talk-it-down theory.

Working Americans and their families arrived on the doorstep of the current economic crisis uniquely ill-equipped to cope with its consequences. Rather than having gained a financial protective coating during the period of growth that preceded it, working families up and down the income spectrum were actually nudged further out on an economic limb and therefore were primed for being picked off once problems emerged.

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