I won’t presume to speak for anyone else but my family, but we’re worse off. I lost my job in 2002 (we could see the business going downhil starting exactly on 9/11), was out of work long enough to run out of unemployment, and wound up with a job that pays 1/3 less than my old one. My IRA, which I opened with great fanfare in 1998, has amassed a total net return of 1.6% (not 1.6% per year, a total of 1.6%). Meanwhile my daughter’s tuition keeps going up while her scholarships stay flat and my sons have had trouble keeping up their hours on their part-time jobs.
I’m definitely better off than I was four years ago; I’m earning about 50% more than I was then, and my wife’s income has done similarly pleasant things. And we refinanced our house last summer, so we’ll stop sending checks to the bank in about 14 years.
So that’s the ‘I’ part; now the ‘we’ part.
John Mace asked for sources of statistics. The Census Bureau (www.census.gov) is the keeper of income statistics and poverty statistics; the Bureau of Labor Statistics (www.bls.gov) has the employment and unemployment data.
The income statistics are released annually; the income statistics for 2002 were released in September 2003, and the 2003 numbers won’t be out until August. (They changed the income/poverty release timetable.) Putting the 2000-01 and 2001-02 comparisons together, it appears as if median household income dropped by 3.2% between 2000 and 2002, adjusted for inflation. Whether that’s bounced back between 2002 and now, your guess is as good as mine.
Between April 2000 and April 2004, the US economy lost 775,000 nonfarm jobs (you’ve heard a higher job loss figure if you’ve been paying attention, but that’s measuring from the March 2001 peak), and it would have been a lot more if governments at various levels hadn’t picked up the slack, adding 766,000 jobs in that period. So private nonfarm employment has dropped by 1.54 million between April 2000 and April 2004. Either way you look at it, that’s not doing too good, because the civilian labor force has increased by 4 million during the period. And that’s with the civilian labor force participation rate having dropped from 67.3% to 65.9% during the period.
The number of unemployed has jumped by 50%, from 5.48 million to 8.16 million, and that’s on top of the number of people not in the labor force jumping from 69.3 million to 76.0 million. (An increase of 9.7%. US pop has gone from 281M to 293M during the period, an increase of 4.3%.)
Meanwhile, our government has gone into debt on a staggering scale. (It’s a real trip to go to whitehouse.gov and type “surplus” into the search engine; all sorts of documents like this jump out, along with OMB director Mitch Daniels’ 8/22/01 statement that “The report we’ve issued this morning confirms that the nation has entered an era of solid surpluses.” Maybe not.) This reduces the government’s ability to deal with new problems, expected or unexpected, without going yet further into debt.
And of course we’re in a quagmire in Iraq, unless the ‘new’ government orders us out; even Bob Novak says things are going badly in Afghanistan; and we’ve turned international good will into enmity while getting into this bind.
I’d say ‘we’ are considerably worse off than in 2000. YMMV.
I like what QtM said way up there- he is better off, but it has little or nothing to do with the administration currently in office. I like that, and figure that the reverse might also be true in many cases.
I don’t know if it has anything to do with who is president, but we are much better off than we were in 2000. We are making more money, business is better, we were able to refi our mortgage on our new house down from 30 to 15 years, and we are travelling more and working less (we are married in our mid-30’s with 2 little kids, FTR). We have also started up IRAs again (we liquidated mine to buy our first house in 1999) and they are already fully funded for this year. We also set up 529 plans for our kids.
So, I guess if I answer a poll question that is simply “better or worse?”, I say “better” and the current admin gets the credit for it! 
Better off in some ways:
No car payments
Salary is 50% higher (2 promotions are involved)
Housing cost is 15% higher
Worse off in others:
1 car repossessed
1 Bankruptcy
1 Home Foreclosure
$120k investment equity is now $0
Retirement funds reduced to only 401.k
*The above are due to economy-based business failures.
I assume by “we” you mean we as a country, or society, or civilization, if you want to include all of the Anglo-American-European world. I’d say we’re worse off. Fanatical Islam is, IMHO, forming itself into a threat that is scarier than that posed by the Communist bloc during the cold war. There are potentially a plenitude of geopolitical debates in that statement, but I’ll leave those to others.
As for “me”, I’m definitely doing better. I’m still working at the same company, enjoy my job, and am pulling down about 40% more than I did back then. It’s scary to be so expensive! 
Well, my income went up sharply in the bubble years, and has stagnated over the past four. We did refinance, so my payments are lower, to the point where my after-tax cost for everything (mortgage, taxes, house insurance) is less than the rent I was paying in 1999, when we bought, which is nice.
My wife’s income hasn’t gone anywhere in forever.
I transferred to where I am now in May '00, with the idea of riding out what I could see was a coming recession. Figured two years would do it. Four years later, I’m still in the same place. OTOH, I’ve done what I wanted: survived the lows of the business cycle with my job and income intact. But I’ve given up on ever getting out of where I am now; better to just ride this horse 'til it drops, given that we now have a world where every non-manufacturing job just about that doesn’t absolutely require you to be on site is in danger from either outsourcing or from illegally imported workers. (I say that because given that the number of H1-Bs being issued has dropped, the only way to account for the nevertheless increased number of imported workers is through subterfuge of one sort or another.) The current Admin bears full blame for these illegal workers, far as I’m concerned. Not only are they doing nothing, they have no intention of doing anything as well.
I ‘got retired’ a year and a half ago, with pension of about half what it would have been if I had worked to age 65. With the economy as it is, between enjoying my free time and not wanting to take a job from someone who really needs it, I haven’t looked for work.
My brother and two other Senior Engineers (civil) just got layed off on three hours’ notice by their firm in Seattle.
A co-worker got laid off before I did, and hasn’t been able to find work in her area of expertise (technical) at all. She is now working for a lot less money.
This administration has greatly increased their ability to bully their citizens, and reduced the ability of the citizens to supervise their government.
This administration has also plunged into debt, is selling national resources as fast as they can get away with it, act like incompetent bullies internationally, etc.
Schwarzenegger’s budget has reduced medical care, reduced the number of kids in colleges, increased their fees, cut high school and elementary education, cut the kind of regulation that keeps brokers from robbing their clients (so I’m more vulnerable), etc. So far that hasn’t impacted me directly, but I want them kept honest so I don’t have to be more sophisticated than my broker.
Neither do the education cuts impact me directly, but I want especially the middle- and lower-class kids to have a future that doesn’t involve mugging little old ladies, one of which I eventually expect to be.
More bad news for Kerry and Bush-haters:
56% say they are better off now, and other stats of interest
Jobs Index highest since Reagan
but great news for the rest of us.
And the problem with this analysis is that it doesn’t take into account the fact that many high-paying jobs were overpaid. And many of those jobs shouldn’t have existed at all. When the bubble built on nothing burst, did anyone expect to return to that time?
Historically, we haven’t looked at employment as % of higher paying job. Why should we now?
I can assure you I was not overpaid. Nor was my job in the Internet. Rather, it was data analysis. In this case, analysis of money. Before that, I was doing the same thing; but with radar cross section data. Before that, it was data analysis of aircraft flight tests. We’re not talking about the “tech bubble” here; just normal business.
Because the question is if I’m better off now than four years ago. My income bears directly on this question. Employment isn’t a black and white issue, “You’re either employed, or you’re not.” Unless you believe that a burger flipper at McDonalds is equivalent employment to being a lawyer, say.
This is a good point to bear in mind! Macroeconomic statistics are easy to manipulate and are subject to differing interpretations by different people. The media and whatever administration is in power, tend to focus on macroeconomic numbers. But people live on the microeconomic level where the cost of a gallon of gas, the price of milk and food, the price of local housing/rentals and quality of your job are what you evaluate your sense of well-being. On this level, whether you are better off or not is usually easy to say personally but difficult to extrapolate across the country due to many personal variables, such as what industry you are in, what region of the country you live in, what age group you are in, amount of education, etc.
I was happy to see that there are a number of people who can say they are better off. By my count (it was a bit difficult and admittedly subjective), I came up with 18 responses of ME being better off and 12 responses of ME being worse off. In the WE category (as a country), it looks like 10 say worse, 2 say better and 3 say the same.
Some points to keep in mind:
It has been written that many consumers have managed to keep up their lifestyles though re-fi’s and using some of the savings they realized to fuel continued spending. Also, the Federal Reserve has been flooding the country with easy money (and they can’t continue to do this forever). Inflation appears to be picking up. Housing values could take a fall, particularly if interest rates rise rapidly. If economic growth keeps up (as judged by the macro government numbers), interest rates will rise, perhaps substantially, in the next year. We also need to pay for the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, deal with the growing deficit and address the sharply declining value of the dollar, among many other pressing macro issues.
So regardless of your current situation, as many should remember from March 2000 or the aftermath of 9-11, the condition of the economy can change very rapidly due to changes in investor sentiment, economic policy or perhaps another major terrorist attack. If you’re personally doing well, make sure you are putting enough aside for that rainy day…
btw: the responses of everyone who has posted in this thread have been enlightening and refreshingly civil. Thanks!