Economists are optimistic.
Most of the people who say the stock market is going ever higher have a stock they want to sell you, but that doesn't mean they're wrong. Economists from a wide spectrum of political belief think the country is doing just fine. A higher fraction of working-age Americans are actually at work than ever before in our history, and they're spending what they earn. From the early 1970s to the early 1990s, the share of gross domestic product taken by profits was a declining line of the graph. In this decade, it's been rising.