It's easy to forget that Americans are voting in a year that marks the 250th anniversary of the nation's Declaration of Independence. You don't hear much about the Declaration in the campaign rhetoric, and most people would bristle at the notion that the sublime message of the founding document has much to do with the messy politics of this year.

But maybe one can detect, here and there, echoes of the Americans of 250 years ago.

Not in ordinary political rhetoric, however. There is support in polling evidence for one economist's observation that "2026 marks the worst Americans have ever felt about the economy, their personal financial situation, and government economic policy, and the records go back to 1960." Reporters are hearing variations on that theme in voter interviews.

But when you look at economic indicators, there's little basis for such complaints. Inflation and gasoline price increases are lower than at this point four years ago, unemployment is at historically low levels, and stock prices — and remember that most Americans are directly or indirectly investors — are near record highs.

The American patriots of 1776 had their economic complaints as well. The economy then was so different from today's that it's impossible to make dollar-to-dollar comparisons, but in terms of calorie consumption, the North American British colonists were probably the best-fed people on earth in the 18th century. Meat was plentiful, famine was unheard of, property ownership was widely dispersed, and the total population was doubling in less than 35 years.

The North American seaboard and western Europe were then, unknowingly, on the threshold of a new economic era. Before 1800, the world's economies never grew much, and when they did, as the British clergyman Thomas Malthus pointed out, increasing........

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