Exit polls from last week's election confirm previous reports that Americans are pessimistic about the economy, with 70 percent viewing economic performance as poor, and 78 percent expressing worry about the economy’s direction in the year ahead, according to ABC News.

Michael Bernick, an adjunct fellow at the Milken Institute, sees that economic dissatisfaction persisting, and two oft-ignored reasons help explain why, he writes on Fox & Hounds, a California political/business issues website.

"The first is the rise of the benefits society, with benefit programs replacing employment," Bernick says. "No level of food stamps, income subsidies, or SSI/SSDI [Social Security insurance/Social Security disability insurance] will lead to economic satisfaction."

Number two is "the sharpening of the meritocracy," Bernick writes.

"Across the political spectrum, the unquestioned goal is job placement based on 'merit.' Not only is the meritocracy, though, morally suspect — how are each of us responsible for our heredity and early environment — but also the closer we get to a meritocracy, the greater will be the economic dissatisfaction of the great majority who do not reach the highest levels (and even some who do)."

Meanwhile, Jeffrey Dorfman, an economics professor at the University of Georgia, argues on in an article for Forbes, that the combination of a Democratic president and a Republican Congress just might work out swimmingly for the economy.

He looked at economic growth rates from 1947 through 2014, with all the iterations for party control of the White House and Congress.

The strongest growth took place under a Democratic president-Democrat Congress: an average of 4.3 percent per year, he says. But the second best scenario has been a Democrat president-Republican Congress: 3.7 percent growth.

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