United States of America eSeries: Grumpy Old Party 🐘

Grumpy Old Party 🐘

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It's officially the season of strangers asking one another, "Hot enough for ya?" in elevators and grocery checkout lines. Let's get into it.

By Allison Morrow

🐘 GOP: GRUMPY OLD PARTY

The US economy, while not perfect, is flourishing. Unemployment is shrinking. Americans are traveling and going to the movies again.

But Republicans are curiously miserable.

Consumer sentiment among self-identified Republicans is worse today than during the height of the pandemic, my colleague Matt Egan writes. In fact, Republicans are more pessimistic than at any point since September 2010, when the economy was just beginning to dig out of the Great Recession, according to closely watched surveys by the University of Michigan.

It's an odd disposition. After all, stocks are setting records almost daily. The housing market is on fire. Gross domestic product is expected to grow at an average pace of 7.5% this year. 7.5! That's bananas. The fastest growth rate since 1951. (Nineteen-fifty-one, y'all!)

WHY SO CRABBY?

Polarization of consumer sentiment along party lines is not entirely new, but it got significantly worse during the Trump era and continues to this day, Matt explains. "It didn't really matter who was elected, until Trump," said Richard Curtin, who leads the University of Michigan's closely watched consumer sentiment surveys.

"The overall level of consumer confidence nationally didn't really change when Biden took office," Curtin said. "Democrats and Republicans just switched places."

RELATED: Americans feel more confident now than at any point during the pandemic, new data from The Conference Board shows.

⛽ QUOTE OF THE DAY

This is not the time to fill up every car you have and every container you have.

More than 40 million Americans are expected to hit the road this holiday weekend, and a growing number of gas stations are facing shortages. But please: Don't freak out, says Tom Kloza, global head of energy analysis for the Oil Price Information Service. "We hate to see shortages and outages caused by drivers panicking and topping off their tanks."

🙏 NOW HIRING: LITERALLY ANYONE

The worker shortage is by no means unique to America — businesses around the world are struggling to hire right now.

And the reasons for the scarcity boil down to a simple but often misunderstood reality: Human beings are neither stagnant nor interchangeable. We move around, change careers, go back to school, maybe even sell our worldly possessions and get a sailboat and set off on adventures with our dog and a case of rosé and some books and live off the sea… or whatever.

OUT OF SYNC

Anyway, the point is, when a truck driver retires, for example, you can't just toss the keys to the rig to a laid-off bartender as a substitute. Retraining takes time, and right now we're out of sync: Demand bounced back far faster than companies could rehire or train new workers.

Another way the world is out of sync: geography. The pandemic shut down borders, kept young people from moving away from home, and pushed city people (starved of pretty much everything that makes city life worth the premium), to the countryside. Without migration, places like Singapore have been deprived of foreign labor they once depended on.

My colleague Julia Horowitz has more on how the job economy may never be the same.

RELATED: The shoe chain DSW, like most retailers, is having trouble finding workers. So it called in the robots.

💰 NUMBER OF THE DAY

$100,000

JPMorgan Chase is raising the salary of first-year analysts to $100,000, up from $85,000. Six figures ain't bad for a fresh-faced college grad or newly minted MBA landing their first Wall Street gig. But it's not without strings — first-year analysts work notoriously long hours in fiercely competitive environments that have come under increased scrutiny of late.

WHAT ELSE IS GOING ON?

✈️ United Airlines announced orders to buy 270 jets, the largest aircraft purchase in the company's history and the biggest order by any airline in about a decade.

🚫Synchrony, America's largest store credit card company, says no one should work from the office five days a week, even as the pandemic winds down.

🚗 A few months ago, Uber told employees they would be required to come back to the office at least three days a week. Now the company is backtracking.

🎆Good luck finding fireworks ahead of this weekend. For the second year in a row, fireworks shortages are leaving shelves empty and raising prices.