By RACHEL HUNTER
Editorial Intern
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WASHINGTON – The current economic crisis has caused Americans to turn to family and friends – rather than those in the public and private sector – for financial assistance, according to the 10th Allstate Heartland Monitor Poll.
The recently released poll revealed a collapse in consumer confidence, despite the 1.3 percent increase in the country’s GDP since last quarter. The overall consensus is that people feel they can’t trust the elected officials or the selected officials in financial institutions, said Edward Reilly, the Group CEO of Financial Dynamics.
“There’s just this sense of disillusionment and alienation that American voters have from those in [leadership],” Reilly said. “The national debt has come to mean, to them, a lack of discipline, a lack of planning for the future and a lack of looking out for future generations.”
As Americans look to future – carrying a $15 trillion debt on their backs – 70 percent of those surveyed believe the current leadership will do nothing to resolve their financial burden and will only lead them “down the wrong path.”
President Barack Obama’s approval ratings are at an all time low of 44 percent despite his campaign promises to bring change to Washington.
The American people are still looking for “change” to come to Washington. And many, like Margaret Simms, the director of the Urban Institute’s Low-Income Working Families Project, don’t think it’ll be an easy thing for the government to handle.“There are some hard choices that … politicians, in the end, will need to make in order to get us on the right path toward dealing with the long-term problem,” she said. “It’s time we started to think about our next generation, our children.”
Rachel Hunter is an editorial intern at The Washington Times.
