Advertisement

SKIP ADVERTISEMENT

Polls Show Government Shutdown Is Eroding Faith in Economy

Demonstrators rallying against the government shutdown outside the Capitol last week. The shutdown and a late-year slump in the stock market have eroded Americans’ optimism about the economy.Credit...Erin Schaff for The New York Times

WASHINGTON — The government shutdown and a late-year slump in the stock market have eroded Americans’ optimism for the economy and support for President Trump’s economic policies, new surveys show.

The decline in confidence is widespread — among Democrats and Republicans, high and low earners — and it suggests mounting danger for Mr. Trump and the economic expansion that he claims as a strong point of his presidency. Sustained drops in confidence often signal dampened consumer spending in the months ahead, and can be the precursor to broader economic downturns.

On Friday, the University of Michigan’s consumer sentiment index fell to the lowest point of the Trump presidency, well below forecasters’ expectations. Analysts attributed the drop largely to the partial government shutdown, which has entered its fifth week.

Economic confidence also fell, across nearly all demographic groups, in a poll conducted this month for The New York Times by the online research firm SurveyMonkey.

“If you have that many people in the economy that are not getting paychecks, are not able to pay their rent, pay their mortgages, there’s going to be a broad macroeconomic impact,” said Kevin Stay, a 27-year-old survey respondent in Pittsburgh. “That’ll affect everything. It’ll ripple through the economy.”

Business groups on Friday called on the president and Congress to reopen the government immediately.

“The current shutdown — now the longest in American history — is causing significant and in some cases lasting damage to families, businesses and the economy as a whole,” the groups wrote in a letter posted on the website of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce.

The SurveyMonkey poll found that Americans remained relatively upbeat about their personal finances, particularly Democrats and independents, whose assessment of their family’s economic situation has brightened since the November elections. But a wide swath of respondents reported increasing worries about the economy over all.

Nearly a third of respondents to the poll said the United States economy was worse off than it was a year earlier. That’s up from fewer than a quarter of respondents in January 2018. And respondents were nearly as likely to say the next five years will bring “periods of widespread unemployment or depression” as “continuous good times economically.” As recently as November, optimists outnumbered pessimists on that question by more than 10 percentage points.

The Michigan survey found something similar: Respondents were still fairly positive about the current economy but were far more negative about the future.

Mr. Stay works for a technology company and hasn’t suffered personally from the standoff between Mr. Trump and Democrats in Congress. But he said the shutdown had nonetheless made him more cautious. He recently moved home from Colorado and is living with family; he had intended to get his own apartment, but he has delayed those plans partly because of the uncertainty surrounding the shutdown.

“You’re not going to go out and make a major purchase if you’re worried the economy’s about to take a major downturn,” Mr. Stay said. “I work in sales. My income is pretty directly tied to how the whole economy is doing.”

By most conventional measures, the economy is still doing well. The unemployment rate is near a five-decade low, wage growth is accelerating, and overall economic growth in 2018 was on track to be the strongest since before the 2008-9 recession.

But cracks had begun to show even before the shutdown idled hundreds of thousands of federal workers shortly before Christmas. The stock market dropped precipitously late in the year as investors became concerned about the effects of a trade war with China, among other factors, and the housing market has slowed. Many economists had already expected growth to slow in 2019 as the effects of the tax cuts that took effect last year begin to wane.

Those fears seemed to have little effect on consumers, whose spending powered a strong holiday shopping season and fueled economic growth for much of last year. Any hints that consumers are growing jittery are worrisome, said Stephen Stanley, chief economist for Amherst Pierpont Securities.

“The consumer’s really the star of the show right now, and if you were to see any signs of a break there, it would be significant,” Mr. Stanley said.

Downturns in consumer sentiment don’t always translate into cutbacks in actual spending. And past shutdowns haven’t done lasting damage to either confidence or spending. Jim O’Sullivan, the chief United States economist for High Frequency Economics, wrote in a research note that the Michigan index also fell in 2013, then bounced back quickly when the government reopened. But he cautioned that the current shutdown had already outlasted any previous one.

Adding to the challenge for forecasters, the shutdown has stopped the release of much government economic data. The Commerce Department, for example, was scheduled to release retail sales figures for December e this week; that report has been put off indefinitely.

“Disentangling what is temporary effects and what is the underlying trend becomes that much more difficult,” said Brett Ryan, an economist with Deutsche Bank in New York. “It just adds more uncertainty during a period when the market’s already skittish.”

In the absence of much hard evidence, economists have been left guessing about the shutdown’s impact. White House economists this week doubled their estimate of the damage being inflicted. The Council of Economic Advisers said the shutdown would reduce quarterly economic growth by 0.13 percentage points for every week that it lasted as federal contractors lost out on work and government employees went without pay.

Some analysts see even bigger potential effects: Deutsche Bank estimated on Thursday that in the worst case, the economy could contract in the first quarter because of an extended shutdown.

Portions of the surveys offered a pointed political warning to Mr. Trump. In the span of a year of SurveyMonkey polling, the president has lost much of the approval he enjoyed with Americans on economic policy. Nearly as many respondents now say his policies are making the economy worse as say they are making the economy better. A year ago, Mr. Trump held a seven-percentage-point advantage on that question.

As a retiree in Arizona, Pat Cafferata hasn’t felt the effects of the shutdown firsthand. And although she watches the markets with interest, she said she wasn’t too worried that an economic slowdown would force her to make a major change to her way of life.

But she is worried about the people who are missing paychecks, and about the larger effects of a prolonged shutdown. She pointed to reports that past shutdowns ended up costing taxpayers more than keeping the government open.

“That is such a waste of money in an era when we don’t have enough money to waste on things like that,” she said.

A former advertising executive, Ms. Cafferata, 74, viewed the shutdown through a business lens.

“Any government shutdown is a reflection of poor management,” she said. “You don’t run a business this way, and to run a country this way is just terrible.”

Jim Tankersley reported from Washington, and Ben Casselman from New York.

About the survey: The data in this article came from an online survey of 10,447 adults conducted by the polling firm SurveyMonkey from Jan. 7 to Jan. 13. The company selected respondents at random from the nearly three million people who take surveys on its platform each day. Responses were weighted to match the demographic profile of the population of the United States. The survey has a modeled error estimate (similar to a margin of error in a standard telephone poll) of plus or minus 1.5 percentage points, so differences of less than that amount are statistically insignificant.

A version of this article appears in print on  , Section A, Page 14 of the New York edition with the headline: Polls Show Decline in Optimism, a Potential Warning for the Economy. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

Advertisement

SKIP ADVERTISEMENT