If you have a sense that our country isn't moving in the right direction, you aren't alone.
A new Gallup survey shows that a whopping 70 percent of the 1.015 Americans adults surveyed are dissatisfied with the way things are going in the country, and only 28 percent are satisfied.
That satisfaction figure is down from 31 percent in March and 32 percent in January and February, though it remains higher than it was for much of 2013 and 2014.
President Obama can take no great pleasure in the fact that the current 28 percent satisfaction level stands at the higher end of Gallup's readings since he entered the White House in January 2009 because it is still on the low side of what Gallup has recorded since 1979.
"Satisfaction remains historically low — well below its average level in 1988 and 2000, when the presidential candidate of the same party as the sitting president won the national popular vote," writes Gallup's Lydia Saad.
"U.S. satisfaction is currently closer to the extremely low level that existed in 2008, a state of affairs that likely hindered the incumbent party's candidate in that year's election."
That's an ominous note for Hillary Clinton and the Democratic Party going into 2016.
Meanwhile,
former White House budget director David Stockman isn't exactly jumping head over heels for her presidential campaign.
Clinton's flaws: "she thinks war is peace; deficits don't matter; the baby boom is entitled to the social insurance they didn't earn; and that the Fed's serial bubble machine is leading the nation back to prosperity," he writes on his blog.
"Actually, it's leading to the greatest financial bubble in human history. After 75 months of ZIRP [zero-interest-rate policy] and a decade of Wall Street coddling and subsidization by the Fed, the windfalls to the 1 percent have become unspeakable in their magnitude and illegitimacy."
The Fed has kept its federal funds rate target at a record low of zero to 0.25 percent since December 2008, while its balance sheet has mushroomed to $4.5 trillion through quantitative easing.
"The day of fiscal reckoning is being forestalled by an artificial, destructive and unsustainable monetary regime that has drastically lowered the true cost of the national debt and monetized trillions of public debt with central bank credit plucked out of thin air," Stockman says.