ABSTRACT
In July 1990, the national economy fell into a recession. Officially, it lasted only through March of the following year, but the recovery was so anemic and marked by periodic flameouts that nine months into it polls revealed that 8 in 10 Americans still believed the economy to be in very bad shape.1 Not until 1994, nearly a year after Bill Clinton rode the tide of economic “doom and gloom” to victory over George Bush in the 1992 Presidential election, did the economy experience marked improvement. Even then public anxiety remained high. At the end of 1995, one of the strongest boom years in the post-World War II era, a poll conducted by The New York Times found that more than half the respondents believed they were not as well off as they had expected to be at this point in their lives and that 28 percent felt they had fallen behind in the past couple of years.2
