Economix Blog: Washington, Capital of Economic Optimism

CATHERINE RAMPELL

Dollars to doughnuts.

In case you’re wondering why Congress spent so much time twisting itself in knots over the long-term deficit, instead of over the current jobs crisis, this might help explain things: Washington, D.C., is the most economically optimistic area in the nation, according to Gallup.

Every day Gallup polls Americans across the country about whether they think current economic conditions are good (or “excellent,” “only fair” or “poor”), and whether the economy is getting better or worse. For each question, Gallup subtracts the percentage of people answering negatively from the percentage of people answering positively. Then the two results are averaged to come up with a value that Gallup calls the Economic Confidence Index.

If the index value is above zero, that means that people are generally confident about the economy. If the index value is below zero, then people are more pessimistic about the economy.

And guess what? Not only does Washington have the highest index value of any state or district in the country, it’s also the only place where the index value is positive.

Here are the top 10 states in terms of overall economic confidence:

Source: Gallup

These results are based on telephone interviews with 87,634 employed adults, 18 or older, conducted from January to June 2011 as part of Gallup Daily tracking. For each state, the margin of sampling error ranges from plus or minus 1 percentage point (for large states such as California), to plus or minus 8 percentage points (for the District of Columbia).

The biggest gap between the District of Columbia and the rest of the country is created by the second question used to create the Economic Confidence Index, on whether the economy is getting better or worse.

In every state, a majority of residents think the economy is getting worse. In the nation’s capital, however, a full 60 percent of people think the economy is getting better.

This may be good evidence for those arguing that Washington exists in its own disconnected bubble. At the very least, Gallup’s results show that the District of Columbia thinks very differently about the state of the economy than the rest of the country does.

Article source: http://feeds.nytimes.com/click.phdo?i=ad03bb7fa93fb1f8c3eefe806c2e6388