Confidence about the availability of jobs has dropped over the past two months.

Forty-five percent (45%) of adults now say it is possible for anyone who really wants to work to find a job, according to a new Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey. In early January, 52% of Americans believed this to be true.

Sixty percent (60%) of Republicans believe you still can find work if you really want it, but even GOP confidence is down 10 points from early January. Just 37% of Democrats share that view.

These findings come at a time when 30% of workers nationwide say their employers are laying people off. More than four million jobs have been lost nationwide during the current recession.

While confidence about finding a job is down, most (56%) Americans say it is still possible for just about anyone in the United States to work their way out of poverty, an increase of five points from January. Twenty-eight percent (28%) say it is not possible, and 16% are unsure.

Largely unchanged are the findings when Americans are asked if it is still possible for just about anyone in America to work hard and get rich: 33% say yes, but 51% disagree. Sixteen percent (16%) are not sure.

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The U.S. unemployment rate hit 8.1 percent in February, the highest in 25 years. Job losses have been greater than 600,000 for each of the last three months, something which has never happened before since the government began collecting unemployment figures in 1939.

With the government’s release of the latest unemployment data on Friday, confidence as measured by the Rasmussen Investor and Consumer Indexes has fallen to record lows.

The Rasmussen Employment Index, a monthly measure of U.S. worker confidence in the employment market, fell for the fifth straight month in February. It marked the first time in the five-year history of the Index that confidence in the labor market has fallen for five months in a row.

Lower-income workers are less confident about finding a job if you really want one than are those who earn more than $60,000 a year. Americans age 30 to 49 also are more confident than those older and younger than they are.

A majority of Republicans (69%) and unaffiliated adults (51%) say it is still possible for anyone in America to work their way out of poverty, as do the plurality of Democrats (49%). Again, confidence that this is true is highest among those ages 30 to 49. Lower-income adults are less confident than higher earners.

Just 37% of Republicans, 34% of Democrats and 28% of unaffiliateds believe it is still possible for anyone in America to work hard and get rich. Sixty percent (60%) of unaffiliateds say it’s no longer possible, a view shared by 50% of Republicans and unaffiliated 46% of Democrats.

Indicative of the current job climate was the finding in late January that 37% of Americans now say it is better to work for the government than for private business. This is a major change from five years ago when the trend was away from government and toward entrepreneurship and self-employment.

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