Poll Proves Economy Is Fixed

We know one thing for sure about our horrible new economy: numbers don't matter. Feelings do.

What matters is not how many dollars we have in our newly cratered retirement accounts, or how much we might sell our houses for if we ever own houses again, or how many dollars multiplied and then vanished when a few capricious idiots at a few select financial institutions used the magic of "leverage" to turn a handful subprime Floridian mortgages into a toxic death-spiral that bankrupted Iceland and several other economies. All those dollars and numbers, you see, were imaginary -- figments of some banker's imagination, placeholders on a balance sheet, until suddenly, by virtue of their loss, they became real.

So numbers do not matter in the new economy, because we are powerless to affect numbers. As anybody who has visited a therapist in the past 25 years can tell you, we can only control our feelings. Attitude matters. Psychology matters. And through the sheer force of psychology, we can will ourselves into a better economy.

A new poll by the New York Times and CBS shows that people feel better about the economy now than they did in January. This, despite steadily worsening job numbers, the as-yet-undetermined effect of the president's stimulus bill, and the continued inexorable collapse of our nation's banking and automotive sectors. So why do we feel better?

Because every couple of weeks President Obama comes on the television and says gravely but confidently that America's best days lie ahead, that the road to solvency will not be short or easy but we will get there, and that he is very very angry with those terrible bankers/mortgage brokers/corporate boards/greedy executives who got us into this mess but we must put away our pitchforks and get to work on "rebuilding America" or whatever.

We find this soothing, and the promise of hundreds of billions of federal dollars flooding our local economies might make Bobby Jindal mad but it seems to be perking people up a bit.

And this promise of future gain, more than the unrelenting unpleasantness of the present, determines reality. The more we believe the economy is improving, the more we spend, and the more we spend, the more the economy improves.

Thus concludes the story of how a single poll of consumer attitudes reversed the American economy's agonizing decline and brought prosperity back to us all.

Black-Scholes methodology evangelist Sara K. Smith writes for NBC and Wonkette.