Haves and have-nots diverge on views of economic revival

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The ‘green shoots’ idea of a budding economic turnaround has resonated with Americans of mid- and upper-income levels in recent months, a Pew Research Center survey found.

But the lowest-income folks don’t buy it. Their perception of the economy has worsened since winter, despite some better data on consumer and business activity.

The survey doesn’t say so directly, but the gulf between the two views may be tied more to what has gone on in financial and commodity markets than to any detectable changes in the economy: For the better-off, the stock market’s rebound probably has trumped the renewed pain at the gas pump.

The survey of 1,502 adults, conducted June 10-14, found that 52% of those earning $75,000 or more believe the economy will improve over the next year, up from 36% who answered that way in a Pew poll in February -- when global stock markets were crumbling and the economic data were almost uniformly awful.

Of those earning $30,000 to $74,999, 51% now expect a better economy over the next year, also up from 36% in February.

But just 42% of Americans earning less than $30,000 now expect the economy to improve. More striking, that’s down from 52% in February, the Pew survey found.

People with money in the stock market saw share prices rebound sharply from March 10 to mid-June. The Standard & Poor’s 500 index was up nearly 40% in the three months.

In the same period, oil jumped nearly 50%, pushing gas back above $3 a gallon in California (a level that may mark the near-term peak, my colleague Ron White writes today).

The rising cost of filling up also seemed to be reflected in lower-income respondents’ ranking of top personal economic issues. Of those earning less than $30,000, 33% cited ‘rising prices’ as the top worry in the latest survey, up from 27% in the February survey.

By contrast, the percentage of people in that income group citing ‘the job situation’ as the top economic worry actually fell to 47% from 53%.

Of people earning more than $75,000, the job situation was cited by 40% as the top economic worry in the new survey, up from 35% in February.

The upper-income respondents also were more worried about rising prices (22% said so in the latest survey, up from 12% in February). But they were far less worried about the health of financial markets, thanks to Wall Street’s comeback: ‘Problems in financial markets’ were listed by 23% of the upper-income respondents as their top economic worry in the lastest survey, a big drop from 35% in February.

-- Tom Petruno