It’s voters like these who are giving Obama his cushion.  The president trails among people who report themselves worse off than four years ago.  But he leads comfortably among Americans who are merely treading water. 

These signs of resignation are good news for the White House, but they’re bad news for the country’s future.  Even if a rich nation like ours can learn to live with 8 percent unemployment and slow growth for now, the costs of persistent joblessness and sustained stagnation could be devastating in the long run. 

As Don Peck pointed out in his 2011 book “Pinched,” an analysis of the Great Recession’s likely consequences, the socioeconomic scars left by a period of mass unemployment get deeper the longer that period persists.  Young people put off life decisions, delaying education, marriage, childbearing.  Older people drop out of the work force permanently.  Families are strained and split apart; people lose crucial years of saving and asset building; dependency on government assistance becomes a way of life.  And a culture of fearfulness takes hold, discouraging risk-taking and entrepreneurship even when better times return. 

Meanwhile, every year with subpar growth makes our government’s existing liabilities larger, and the fiscal adjustments the country is facing that much more difficult to make.  All of these problems will gradually intertwine, as they already do in Western Europe.  Today’s stagnation means that Americans a generation hence will face bigger-than-expected deficits, even as today’s recession-dampened birthrate means there will be fewer younger workers to help pay them down. 

This grim prospect doesn’t necessarily make the case for electing Romney in Obama’s place.  Indeed, Romney’s dismissal of the government-dependent 47 percent suggests a fatal misunderstanding of what should be his mission — namely, to persuade precisely those Americans clinging, understandably, to government programs in tough times to choose the risks of further change over the temporary security of stasis. 

But the costs of stagnation definitely make the case against the kind of resignation we’re now seeing in the electorate.  Whatever happens in November, American voters should be asking for more — both for themselves, and for future generations — than an economy in which stagnation is the best that we can hope for, and the American dream just means barely getting by.